Solaris Archive

How does OpenSolaris, Sun's effort to free its big-iron OS, fare from a Linux user's point of view? Is it merely a passable curiosity right now, or is it truly worth installing? Linux Format takes OpenSolaris for a test drive, examining the similarities and differences to a typical Linux distro.

This preview of the upcoming OpenSolaris 2008.11 release highlights aspects that should be of interest to systems and storage administrators who have to deal with large storage environments. ZFS is a big component that is referred to often, but there are new storage services and capabilities in addition to ZFS that might be overlooked and are quite compelling. Editor's Note: We ran an article yesterday that covered the surface level (eye-candy) improvements of the 2008.11 release of OpenSolaris.

While OpenSolaris 2008.05 is only two months old, work at Sun is already underway in preparing for the second OpenSolaris release, which will be known as OpenSolaris 2008.11 and has been codenamed Jericho.

Nexenta developers announced the availability of NexentaCore 2.0 Alpha1, a Debian Native OpenSolaris environment and platform, based on an Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" base. NexentaCore 2.0 Alpha1 includes almost 3400 packages ported over during the two week "Hardy Hackathon Fest."

It seems like we're really on the subject of filesystems and related technology the past few days. We had an interview with the man behind BeServed, an item on WinFS' current status, and now we - possibly - have news on ZFS coming to Linux. Possibly, because it's all speculation from here on out.

Last week, on my country's Liberation Day, Sun released OpenSolaris 2008.05, the much awaited first official fruit of Project Indiana. It delivers many of OpenSolaris' major features, such as DTrace, ZFS, containers, and more, in a Linux distribution-like package. The goal is to allow more people to experience Solaris. A few reviews have since hit the web.

OpenSolaris 2008.5, the new distribution based on the OpenSolaris operating system, has been released into the wild. This release follows the conventions set by many of the popular Linux distributions, such as being based on a single live CD with installer, but also adds a load of OpenSolaris-specific features such as ZFS, DTrace, Containers, and a new package management system, IPS. OpenSolaris 2008.5 is the fruit of Project Indiana.

After a long gap and lots of things happening behind the scenes, the BeleniX team is pleased to announce the availability of BeleniX 0.7, an OpenSolaris-based community distribution. This release marks a considerable change in the evolution of BeleniX. Read on for the details.

"Sun Microsystems has gone totally native. Customers can now run unmodified SPARC/Solaris applications on x86 systems thank to a partnership with Transitive. The two companies also plan to craft a new package for running native x86 applications on SPARC machines. Transitive this week announced that the long in beta QuickTransit for Solaris code has moved into production form. It even gets a Solaris Ready Logo and all."

"OpenSolaris has launched a new project, Flexible Mandatory Access Control, to integrate the Flask/TE security scheme into their OS. This is the same underlying model implemented by SELinux, and follows other cross-platform Flask/TE integration projects such as SEDarwin and SEBSD. This is very exciting in terms of establishing compatible security across operating systems, particularly for Mandatory Access Control, which has traditionally been narrowly focused and generally incompatible. With FMAC, we're closer to seeing truly ubiquitous, cross-platform MAC security."

The final 1.0 version of the Nexenta Core Platform has been released. "Nexenta Operating System is a free and open source operating system combining the OpenSolaris kernel with GNU application userland. Nexenta Operating System runs on Intel/AMD 32/64bit hardware and is distributed as a single installable CD. NexentaCore is a minimal (core) foundation that can be used to quickly build servers, desktops, and custom distributions tailored for specialized applications."

"In addition to Project Indiana Developer Preview 2, Solaris users can now rejoice over the next release in the Solaris Express Developer Edition family. SXDE 1/08 is the quarterly update to Sun's next-generation Solaris Operating System that is built from the latest OpenSolaris Nevada technologies. This first SXDE release of 2008 brings a host of new features for the developer such as NetBeans 6.0 and the GlassFish v2 application server. Even for those that aren't developers, SXDE 1/08 brings new features further down on the Solaris stack such as the Sun xVM virtualization server with support for libvirt, support for the 802.11n Intel 4965 wireless chipset, and a variety of new services."

Nexenta Core Platform RC3 is available for download now. Main feature is Xen Dom0/DomU platform support. Other changes in this release includes: critical fixes for native CIFS server, critical fixes for ZFS, critical bug fixes for SATA and networking stacks. CIFS client now included. The Debian apt repository is now complete, with about 2500 tested packages.

"There is no ideal software, it always has bugs. Minor, major or security issues will always exist and modern operating systems need to deal with this fact. What if any software which user installs had a capability to rollback to previously known successful point and operation itself would take no time? What if developer or user has a tool which could checkpoint operating system and capability to revert changes in no time? This is possible if we will marry two great technologies: ZFS and Debian APT. Both technologies now part of Nexenta Operating System which is core foundation for its derivative distributions. Meet apt-clone. The tool which integrates with the NexentaCP system, keeps track of upgrade checkpoints and allows to create/destroy/edit checkpoints by request."