Solaris Archive

"With the introduction of Solaris 10 and the dynamic tracing facility (DTRACE), the ability to dynamically instrument a system and solve complex problems is a D script (D is the language used by DTRACE) away. Several extremely useful D scripts have emerged, so I thought I would share my ten favorite DTRACE scripts with the OSNews community."

Sun Microsystems has distributed more than two million registered licenses for the Solaris 10 Operating System since the software became available on January 31st. These numbers, coupled with a record number of visitors to the Sun website during the last six months, highlight the incredible demand for the freely available operating system.

Some key features that Sun was touting last year for the Solaris 10 platform are still missing in action. The two most important are the Project Janus Linux runtime environment and the ZFS file system. While there has been much speculation that Sun will withdraw support for Project Janus, this is not the case.

"Containers" feature allows multiple virtual machines to share a single copy of the Solaris operating system, unlike other virtual-machine technologies.

A Sun Microsystems desktop engineer has outlined plans to release the code for the company's Java Desktop System (JDS) environment and integrate it better with OpenSolaris.

"Rivalry between different derivatives of OpenSolaris has already begun, two weeks after Sun Microsystems' initial code release."

This site has created a rather large collection of OpenSolaris (Nevada build 16) screenshots. Screenshots guide you through the installation process, configuraton, kernel compiling, BFU-ing, etc.

Solaris Express 6/2005 (a.k.a. Nevada Build 15) was posted today, providing a host of improvements including aggressive use of large pages, desktop enhancements, the "Nemo" (GLDv3) network driver framework, DTrace enhancements, and a host of bug fixes. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is available.

Looks like ZDNet Australia has gone trawling for dirty words in the OpenSolaris code. While they didn't find much there were some pearlers.

Sun Microsystems is guiding the spotlight away from a once-prominent feature of Solaris 10. Elsewhere, Solaris Engineering: huge amount of technical articles. Sun Microsystems is revamping the start-up process for its Solaris operating system, scrapping an awkward, elderly approach for one the company promises will be faster, more familiar and more useful on a wide variety of computers.

The opensolaris.org community site is now live. Source code (some 20,000 files) is available for download, torrent and perusal. Mailing lists, a project overview and a community portal are also live.

Sun Microsystems is expected to release Solaris as open-source software Tuesday, a centerpiece of the company's plan to regain lost relevance and fend of rivals Red Hat, IBM and Microsoft.

With a (relatively) big advertising campaign SUN promoted Solaris 10 (also known as SunOS 5.10). Referring to SUN, with the "revolutionary" JAVADesktop 2 and a lot of new features and improvements, Solaris 10 should be the best OS today. Solaris is free for SPARC owners and for private use or evaluation purpose it's also freely available on the x86. While Solaris actually is kind of a legend, I thought "Hu, this could be an interesting alternative on my PC". Thought, went on and downloaded the ISOs. Read on to see how an average user (me) have experienced Solaris.

Solaris x86 will use GRUB as its boot manager on x86/x64 platforms. See screenshots here.