Solaris Archive

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."

The Register has reviewed OpenSolaris, and concludes: "Sun has made good on its promise to deliver OpenSolaris, the company's Unix-based answer to Linux, with a company-supported, commercial update arriving in mid-May. Although far from a complete product, the latest OpenSolaris is impressive and in the long run could prove a viable alternative to Linux."

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.

Yesterday, the OpenSolaris team released OpenSolaris 2008.05, the fruit of Project Indiana. The first review we found was published over at Blogbeebe, which is overall fairly positive. At the same time, Practical Technology believes that "OpenSolaris has finally been released just in time to die".

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'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."

"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."

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.

"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."

"A week ago we reported that a second preview release of Project Indiana, Sun's attempt at creating an operating system for the desktop based upon OpenSolaris and led by Ian Murdock, was on track to be released in the near future. Thursday afternoon that became true with the test image surfacing for Developer Preview 2 of Project Indiana, or what will formally be called OpenSolaris. Officially, this new release is known as the OpenSolaris Developer Preview 1/08 edition. The general availability release of Project Indiana is expected in March, but today we have up a tour of this new Indiana release."

"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."

Nexenta CP RC2 has been released. "OpenSolaris build 80+ (non-debug); project integration: NWS, AVS, COMSTAR, in-kernel CIFS client; apt-clone: ZFS-integrated safe upgrade via remote APT repository; support for in-place (live) and safe upgrades; installer: multiple improvements; Nexenta Zones (multiple improvements); integrated automatic Zone upgrades; started using conventional Debian development cycle."

IBM and Sun Microsystems are in the final stages of an 18-month-long project to adapt the OpenSolaris operating system to run optimally on Big Blue's z System mainframes. David Boyes, president and chief technology officer of Sine Nomine Associates, a consultancy that handled most of the integration and migration duties, told eWEEK at the Gartner Data Center Conference 2007 that the new IBM-tuned version of OpenSolaris will be ready soon. He declined to be more specific.

"File-sharing between Windows and Sun's OpenSolaris Unix platform is being bolstered through two projects at Sun. The OpenSolaris project: CIFS Server features server software source code that implements the CIFS protocol also known as Server Message Block, the standard for Windows file-sharing services, Sun said. The internal CIFS server enables Microsoft users to store and retrieve files on an OpenSolaris system, Sun said. This project and a related effort, CIFS client, improve the usefulness of OpenSolaris in data environments that serve NFS and CIFS clients, Sun said. Sun recently donated server source code that implements CIFS to the OpenSolaris Project."