Solaris Archive

"This article explains how a Solaris OS application with large memory requirements can effectively create a subprocess without unduly running out of memory or creating a deadlock. It also explores a related issue of how application memory is committed in the Solaris OS as opposed to other operating systems such as Linux." Here's a related article on ZFS and Solaris Containers

Belenix 0.4.3a has been released. "Another release of the LiveCD this month. The significant feature of this release is the inclusion of JDK 1.5 under the new Distributors License for Java as announced by Sun on May 16th in JavaOne. See the JDK Distros Project for more details."

The Solaris Containers technology addresses this void by making it possible to create a number of private execution environments within a single instance of the Solaris OS. This paper provides suggestions for designing system configurations using powerful tools associated with Solaris Containers, guidelines for selecting features most appropriate for the user's needs, advice on troubleshooting, and a comprehensive consolidation planning example.

While there is a lot of buzz about Apple using ZFS, Solaris express of course uses it, and soon Solaris regular will use it (as of Solaris update 2). Yet there are many people that say ZFS is great for servers but people don't need it at home. This blog entry seeks to clear up this falacy. ZFS is possibly more needed at home.

Community contributor Jürgen Keil and Sun engineer Jan Setje-Eilers have been working together to get OpenSolaris based operating systems to work under Apple's BootCamp. Today Jan announced that he had successfully installed and booted build 36 of Solaris Nevada (plus some hacks). A series of bugfixes to make OpenSolaris distributions "just work" have been identified.

"Here are 10 steps to set up a CD-less install server if you are using the Solaris 10 03/05 OS for x86 platforms or a version of Solaris for x86 platforms with GRUB. Booting off the Pre-boot Execution Environment is a lot easier and painless now, as this example shows. This process does not include profiles so you will have to sit through the install process and answer questions. It is just a quick and easy way to get the Solaris OS for x86 platforms installed on a remote machine without burning CDs."

BeleniX 0.4.1 is now available with several additions and improvements: improved bootup time via a variety of mechanisms with further room for improvement in the future, OpenSolaris build 34, improved Monitor auto-detection code, and much more. Get it from their download page.

The Nexenta team has released alpha 4. This is a bug fix release. Nexenta OS alpha 4 is based on Open Solaris build 36, utilizes Debian's apt-get package system, and has GNOME 2.12 as its default desktop. Both a live CD as well as an install CD are available. Visit the getting started page, check out the changelog, and download.

Solaris Express 3/06 was released today. This is build 33 of Nevada. Various additions have been made, as well as the general slew of bug fixes. There is an .iso image for DVD available for download as well.

NexentaOS has released alpha 3 of their OpenSolaris-based Ubuntu distribution. This new version includes OpenOffice.org 2.0 on both the live CD and the install CD, a storage subsystem, and OpenSolaris kernel build #34. Download locations.

Solaris Express 2/2006 (derived from Nevada Build 31) was posted yesterday, providing a host of useful improvements. Wifi, RealPlayer 10, and Gnome-Pilot support were introduced. Roughly 1150 bugs were fixed. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is also available.

"Today, we're making the first source code of our OpenSolaris on Xen project available to the OpenSolaris developer community. There are many bugs still in waiting, many puzzles to be solved, many things left to do. Because we don't believe the developer community only wants finished projects to test. We believe that some developers want to participate during the development process, and now this project can open its doors to that kind of participation. We wanted to start the conversation with working code. So we have a snapshot of our development tree for OpenSolaris on Xen, synced up with Nevada build 31. That code snapshot should be able to boot and run on all the hardware that build 31 can today, plus it can boot as a diskless unprivileged domain on Xen 3.0."

On Wednesday February 8th, the OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board voted to approve The OpenSolaris Charter. Sun Microsystems also approved the Charter, and the document was signed by Glenn Weinberg, vice president of Sun's Operating Platforms Group.

This chapter provides a description of the OpenBoot environment, the PROM, NVRAM, and the kernel. It describes how to access OpenBoot and the various commands that are available to test and provide information about the hardware.