Solaris Archive

Pavel Heimlich has announced the release of an updated version of Korona 4.4.3: "Korona is the live DVD adding KDE4 packages on top of OpenSolaris. It is intended to be the showcase of the current state of the kde-solaris project, definitely not a distribution for any serious use."

Frustrated by Oracle's delay in releasing the latest version of OpenSolaris, the OpenSolaris Governing Board is growing uneasy over Oracle's lack of communication regarding the future of the Unix OS code. At least two members of the board have even said they would be open to forking the code base from the Oracle version.

"Hot on the heals of Oracle's revamp of Solaris support, the licensing agreement for free downloads of Solaris 10 have changed. Here is the bit in question: "...Please remember, your right to use Solaris acquired as a download is limited to a trial of 90 days, unless you acquire a service contract for the downloaded Software". So far the OpenSolaris license has not changed, it's still CDDL."

The NexentaStor project has released version 3.0 of the NexentaStor Community Edition. Based on the Nexenta Core Platform, the CE release is targeted at the home storage user. With its feature set of easy to use, ZFS based features like multiple raid configurations, inline deduplication, compression, integrated search, many plugins, it is a feature-rich gratis storage distribution. Grab iso and VM images from here. Release announcement is here.

"There is a discussion at osnews.com about a simple question: "Should ZFS Have a fsck Tool?". The answer is simple: No. I could stop now, as this answer is pretty obvious when you work a while with ZFS, but i want to explain my position. And i want to ask a different question at the end."

ZFS has received built-in deduplication. "Deduplication is the process of eliminating duplicate copies of data. Dedup is generally either file-level, block-level, or byte-level. Chunks of data - files, blocks, or byte ranges - are checksummed using some hash function that uniquely identifies data with very high probability. Chunks of data are remembered in a table of some sort that maps the data's checksum to its storage location and reference count. When you store another copy of existing data, instead of allocating new space on disk, the dedup code just increments the reference count on the existing data. When data is highly replicated, which is typical of backup servers, virtual machine images, and source code repositories, deduplication can reduce space consumption not just by percentages, but by multiples."

"Sun Microsystems announced the Solaris 10 10/09 Operating System. The Solaris 10 OS has been extended with new performance and power efficiency enhancements, more streamlined management of system installations, updates and fixes, new updates for Solaris ZFS and advancements to further leverage the functionality of the latest SPARC and x86 based systems. Solaris 10 10/09 provides new features, fixes and hardware support in an easy-to-install manner, preserving full compatibility with over 11,000 third-party products and customer applications, including Oracle database and application software."

The Linux desktop has come a long way. It's a fully usable, stable, and secure operating system that can be used quite easily by the masses. Not too long ago, Sun figured they could do the same by starting Project Indiana, which is supposed to deliver a complete distribution of OpenSolaris in a manner similar to GNU/Linux. After using the latest version for a while, I'm wondering: why?

"The OpenSolaris Operating System has many features well suited for embedded systems now and in the future. The kernel is fully preemptable and multithreaded, it provides real-time capabilities, and the modular architecture is highly configurable. Because of these advanced capabilities, we feel there are interesting opportunities to extend OpenSolaris to new platforms, such as the ARM architecture. Therefore, we have created this project to configure the OS/Net (ON) consolidation to meet the requirements of embedded systems and to port OpenSolaris to the ARM platform." The first release of the ARM port of OpenSolaris is now available. Installation notes are available.

The team at Sun behind OpenSolaris has unleashed OpenSolaris 2009.06 upon the world. This new release comes packed with new features, changes, improvements, and fixes, and is the first release of OpenSolaris for SPARC, adding support for UltraSPARC T1, T2 (Sun4v), and UltraSPARC II, III and IV (Sun4u). Read on for some of the improvements that stand out.

Sun is rolling out the latest update to Solaris 10 with enhancements to Solaris Containers, tighter integration with IPSec and upgrades to its Logical Domains technology. The updated Solaris also includes the work Sun and Intel have done over the past two years to optimize the operating system to take advantage of the power, management and monitoring capabilities in Intel's new Xeon 5500 series processors, code-named Nehalem. The seventh update to Solaris 10 comes a year before the planned release of the next-generation Sun OS.

ZFS and unbreakable upgrades were introduced in an earlier article. XercesTech has written a detailed article on how apt-get and zfs join forces to provide a worry-free upgrade experience. "While some operating systems provide the ability to roll back changes, they usually require significant time, or an experienced user with some external repair tools. The goal here is to be instant, if something goes wrong with an upgrade, it should be possible to boot into the old system without running any terminal commands, booting any rescue system or installation disc, or otherwise manually rolling things back."

While Sun continues to push OpenSolaris as an alternative to Linux and *BSD, hobbyists around the net are making their own spin-offs from the Unix flavour. Linux Format looks at some of the most notable, including MilaX, Belenix and Nexenta.

Devzones, short for development zones, is a type of virtualization found in the Nexenta distribution. It can be used to define a base developer environment, which can be easily cloned many times. These copies can easily be destroyed and recreated.Devzones are built upon Opensolaris Zones, which are extensions of a chroot-like environment for the entire installed system. In other words, it allows for virtualization of an Opensolaris environment (and variants of Linux), without the performance hit that is generally associated with virtualization.This article gives a practical introduction into using Devzones.