Solaris Archive

OpenSolaris 2008.11 Released

OpenSolaris 2008.11 has been released. In addition to improvements in ZFS, DTrace, IPS (the new OpenSolaris package manager) and the other OpenSolaris specialties, it also ships with a host of other OSS goodies: Gnome 2.24, Firefox 3, CherryPy, MySQL, DTrace for Ruby and many more. This new release targets developers and desktop users as well as traditional server roles. Download the live cd and give it a spin. Release notes here.

Solaris 10 10/08 Released

A new update of Solaris 10 has been made available today. There are a lot of ZFS enhancements and the next-gen file system is now supported as an installable root file system. You can download it for x86 and SPARC here. Other than that there are new drivers, security enhacements, etc. Fore more information, check the what's new page.

Hadoop Live CD at OpenSolaris.org

Hadoop is a software platform for processing huge amounts of data. It consists of the Hadoop Distributed FileSystem which is capable of storing petabytes of data across thousands of nodes. HDFS ensures that data is always available, even if underlying nodes get corrupted or fail. Hadoop also includes Map/Reduce, a programming model for breaking the data into smaller chunks of work and distributing that work across the nodes in the cluster.

OpenSolaris 2008.11: a Preview for the Storage Admin

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.

A Storage Admin’s Preview of OpenSolaris 2008.11

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.

Sun Debuts OpenSolaris 2008.05

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.

BeleniX 0.7 Released

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 Touts Big Plans for OpenSolaris As First Release Nears

"Sun's Ian Murdock gave a presentation about OpenSolaris at LugRadio Live this past weekend. He hopes to expose open source enthusiasts to unique Sun technologies by creating a cohesive distribution that will provide a complete environment that is adequate for day-to-day use. This will involve bringing together the Solaris operating system and a diverse assortment of open source community projects and "adding a package management system to hold all these pieces together," Murdock stated. The final release will take place in May and the distribution will adhere to a six-month release cycle, just like Fedora and Ubuntu."

Solaris SPARC to x86 Software Highway Opens

"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 To Adopt Flask/TE Security Scheme

"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."

Trademark Policy Dispute Causes Friction in OpenSolaris Community

Dissatisfaction has surfaced in the OpenSolaris community. The dispute centers around how derivatives can use the OpenSolaris name and branding. Sun says that permitting broad downstream use of the OpenSolaris name would risk diluting the Solaris trademark, and it has stated that a policy needs to be established on how the name can and cannot be used. A member of the governance board has resigned. This looks similar to what happened with the Mozilla trademark.

Nexenta Core Platform 1.0 Released

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."