Solaris Archive

This is the first of two articles in which we describe how to acquire and build the source code for OpenSolaris. The first article provides all the necessary background information (terminology, where to get the tools, and so on) and describes a basic compilation and installation, and the second article will describe a more complicated compilation and installation.

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.

Recent technology moves toward virtualization have led some industry insiders to question Sun's commitment to letting users run Linux applications under Solaris. However, executives say the company isn't backing off its home-grown efforts.

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.

Wondering what's up with OpenSolaris after its launch? Well, we have spotted what seems to be the first public distro of OpenSolaris on the wild. Joerg Schilling has released SchilliX, an OpenSolaris-based UNIX Live CD and distribution for X86, AMD64 and EMT64. It is based on Solaris 11 (Nevada) Build 17+.

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 chose to employ the human touch when it introduced more than 5 million lines of Solaris source code onto the Internet on Tuesday.

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.

According to this CNET report next week is the launch date for OpenSolaris. "After having dipped a Solaris toe into the open-source waters last January, Sun Microsystems will take the full plunge next week. The company's OpenSolaris effort will go live early next week, a Sun representative said.

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.

A new Sun BluePrints article discusses the differences between Containers and Zones, and how to get the most out of them. The pdf file is located here.

Sun Microsystems has delayed the release of two major features the company has trumpeted as reasons to try its latest version of the Solaris operating system. Eric Schrock, a Solaris kernel programmer, said on his blog in April that he's "completely redesigning the ZFS commands from the ground up" after finding some deficiencies.

With the release of Solaris 10, Sun Microsystems is attempting to revive some of the strength that the Solaris name once carried in the world of unix workstations and servers. At one point, Sun was the dominant name in commercial unix hardware and software. Then came the crash of the dot-com marketplace, so many of whom had heavy investment into Sun in both the hardware & software market.

The "two man rule" (also sometimes called the "four eyes rule") has its origins in military protocol although for quite some time it has been welcomed into the stockpile of IT security controls used by organizations around the world. The "two man rule" specifies that there must be two individuals that must act in concert in order to perform some action.