Solaris Archive

"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."

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.

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."

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.

"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.

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.

"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 ."

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.

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.

The NexentaOS project has released the 2nd alpha of their OpenSolaris distribution, which uses the Debian userland and tools. It includes a new installer (with auto-partitioning), the addition of KDE, WiFi drivers, full support from booting off of removable drives such as USB sticks, the complete Mono platform including Beagle, Java runtime environment, OpenSolaris build 30, and much more. You can visit the getting started page (screenshots included), read the changelog, and then proceed to the downloads.

HP has gone really, really public about its support for Sun's Solaris 10 operating system by sending out an internal memo. HP has long 'officially' supported various versions of Solaris on its Xeon- and Opteron-based servers. Now, however, it's kind of ready to talk about this support. The company this week 'announced' support of Sun's version of Unix in a statement to staff, according to insiders. The Solaris embrace is being pitched as HP's answer to disgruntled Sun customers trying to make their way off SPARC systems and onto HP's x86 kit.

"All HP blades now support Sun Solaris 10 in 32/64 bit but that's only the beginning. HP's Opteron DL145-G2 is now certified for Solaris 10 32/64 bit too, and sources suggest there's a lot more to come. We'd say that OpenVMS for Opteron is a bridge too far for Hewlett Packard, but additional support for Sun Solaris 10 suggests a degree of cooperation that would have been totally unconceivable two years ago."

Sun has released the 1/06 update for the Solaris 10. You can check out what's new (whatever happened to ye good ol' changelog?) or download it (here I was going to put something about whatever happened to ye good ol' direct download, but nevermind).

"BeleniX 0.3 is available for download now. The following are some of the changes that have gone into this release: based on OpenSolaris build 27 that includes ZFS; a Perl-Curses based hard disk installer (hdinstaller utility) that can install the OS to a Solaris2 partition and also does basic configuration; several bugfixes; bootup time performance enhancements based on amount of RAM available and a few generic optimisations; includes the cardbus and wireless drivers and inetmenu from the laptop community; new software and upgraded to latest Xfce release."