Solaris Archive

So said Sun Microsystems' COO Jonathan Schwartz at an Asia Pacific press conference in Shanghai today. "I don't want to say when that will happen. But make no mistake, we will open source Solaris," he declared. The move is a widely anticipated one. Still, what will keep users and the press guessing for now is what form the licensing model of its longstanding server operating system will take as Schwartz refused to elaborate.

Sun Microsystems Inc. this week is planning to give users of its Solaris operating system a sneak peek at the next version and its new file system. Among the many new features of Solaris 10, due by year's end, is the DFS (Dynamic File System)—a 128-bit system that will automate many common tasks for system administrators.

Sun announced the availability of its new Operating System, branded Solaris on a range of AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon-based systems. The Solaris OS will now run on a variety of servers, workstations, notebooks and "other products," which Sun is hoping will let it extend its reach, and find its way into the OS market.

Sun Microsystems may be selling servers running Linux, but that doesn't mean it is cutting back on the evolution of Solaris. Among its plans, the company is considering offering a free, open source version of its flagship operating system, said Jonathan Schwartz, the company's recently appointed president and chief operating officer. "Maybe we'll GPL it," Schwartz said of Solaris, referring to the GNU General Public License under which the Linux operating system is distributed. "We're still looking at that."

Sun announced the sixth update to the Solaris 9 OE for SPARC & x86 systems, and the availability of next generation Solaris 10 through the Software Express program.

This paper provides detailed discussion regarding the algorithm, implementation, kernel tunables, and messages you are likely to see on a system running the appropriate kernel updates.

In an effort to make its version of Unix compare more favorably to Red Hat's Linux, Sun Microsystems plans in coming weeks to begin selling its Solaris operating system through a subscription model.

The Solaris Operating System includes many file systems, and more are available as add-ons. Deciding which file system to apply to a particular application can be puzzling without insight into the design criteria and engineering tradeoffs that go into each product.

Here is an article that describes a user's experience with Solaris' new feature called "Zones".

Solaris Express 02/04 is now available with exciting new features: partitioning a single Solaris instance into isolated application environments called "zones." It's a project similar to Linux Virtual Server (LVS).

"Every couple of years, Sun Microsystems kicks off a 'new version of Solaris' celebration. This Unix fiesta, if you will, requires several months of marketing hype before the actual operating system is released. And so the party began this week with Sun's plugs for Solaris 10, which should arrive in the second half of 2004." Read the report at TheRegister.

Sun is rolling out a sweeping set of security enhancements to Solaris, punctuated by a kernel rewrite and a partnership with VeriSign. InfoWorld has an article too.

This article describes the challenges of keeping valuable hardware-replicated data safe. Being able to access and manipulate the cloned data is crucial and often neglected. This article describes the different types of data replication and the procedure to access a hardware-replicated set of data on Solaris. This article provides specific Solaris Volume Manager tips for system, storage, and database administrators who want get the most of Solaris Volume Manager software in their data centers.

Solaris is the Unix variant produced by Sun Microsystems and is the result of over 20 years of continuous development. It is the only Unix variant that can run on commodityIntel PC hardware as well as Sun and Fujitsu hardware using Sparc and UltraSparc processors. Sun makes many changes to Solaris, some of them are big news and many are not. It is usually a system administrator that finds out about a new command or an undocumented command or feature (like the -k switch for netstat). This review is about two different installs of Solaris Express on different hardware to show some of the many features of the new release.