Solaris Archive

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."

Belenix, a live CD based on OpenSolaris, has seen the release of version 0.4.3. The Belenix people say this release is major performance upgrade, and includes several fixes such as a new file sorting algorithm to process the DTrace output, some stuff regarding Xserver which leads to boottime being decreased by 20 seconds, various installer bugs, and much more. Rejoice. By the way, here is a chart comparing ZFS with Linux RAID/LVM options.

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.

Solaris Express 4/06 has been released. You can click here to download this release. There have been some minor bugfixes and some relatively noteworthy additions in this release (including PostgreSQL and PCIe support). Sun has a nice, detailed list of new features for this release.

"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."

"This is a full install of Solaris. This build is based on Solaris Express build 35, and includes all of the modifications added by the BrandZ project to enable the Solaris Containers for Linux applications functionality. This build contains pre-release functionality and should be considered completely experimental."

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.

An often-heard complaint when it comes to Solaris is that its installation takes a long time. Apparantly, work is under way to fix it. "While in a chatroom this morning I learned the reason why Solaris installs are so slow. It turns out that pkgadd is really slow on installing small packages, well it turns out that Solaris installs about 10000 little packages in a full install."

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.

"Another release of OpenGrok, made possible due to many contributions of Trond Norbye, a new member of OpenGrok team." OpenGrok 0.3 has been released. This new version introduces support for Subversion and a new GUI. There's also an article available describing OpenGrok's internals.

"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."

"Surya project aims to improve IPv4 forwarding path scalability. Improving forwarding scalability enables a Solaris machine to forward a higher number of packets per second to a greater number of destinations described in the forwarding table. The project delivers a faster forwarding table lookup scheme and a streamlined IPv4 forwarding path. These improvements, when combined with soft-ring (PSARC 2005/654) and Crossbow's polling implementation, will vastly enhance Solaris forwarding throughput performance ."

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.

While Sun Microsystems is open to licensing Solaris under Version 3.0 of the GNU General Public License, it will not reconsider its decision not to license the operating system under GPL 2.0, the current version of the license. Sun created the CDDL for Solaris after rejecting GPL 2.0 as too restrictive for its purposes. Sun will not consider licensing Solaris under the current GPL for the same reasons it gave when it created the CDDL, which is based in large part on the MPL (Mozilla Public License), Tom Goguen, Sun's vice president of software marketing, told eWEEK in an interview.