Solaris Archive

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.

In a weblog entry, Sun's President Jonathan Schwartz has announced that Sun is looking into applying a dual-license scheme to OpenSolaris-- CDDL and GPL3. "We recognize that diversity and choice are important - which is why we've begun looking at the possibility of releasing Solaris (and potentially the entire Solaris Enterprise System), under dual open source licenses. CDDL (which allows customer IP to safely comingle with Solaris source code) and under the Free Software Foundation's GPL3."

"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."

The port of the OpenSolaris kernel to the PowerPC architecture ('Polaris') is now complete. As stated on the Blastware website: "Ladies and Gentlemen, The OpenSolaris kernel for PowerPC has been built." One of the bigger hurdles to having a full-fledged port of OpenSolaris running on your PPC hardware has now been taken.

"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."

Solaris Express 12/2005 (derived from Nevada Build 27) was posted recently, providing a variety of improvements. ZFS and the "Yosemite" UDP performance project were added. Roughly 700 bugs were fixed. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is also available.

The Branded Zones community just opened up on opensolaris.org. This is the underlying technology that enables you to create Linux zones on a Solaris system.

"BeleniX is a free live CD based on the OpenSolaris kernel. With it you can have Solaris, which once ran exclusively on SPARC, powering your modest desktop computer. But with few applications and lacking an installation script, the Live CD does little more than slake a nerd's thirst for a taste of Solaris."

"This is a step-by-step guide (with screenshots) for configuring a virtual machine and installing on it Sun Solaris 10. At the end you'll be able to run the virtual machine inside Workstation 5.5 or inside VMware Player 1.0, which is a free virtualization product."

SchilliX 0.3 has been released. The announcement was made on #opensolaris (and the 'real' announcement is here), and it stated that SchilliX is close to having a self-hosted platform now; one that is not Sun-supplied. Schillix 0.3 features build 27a with ZFS support of the OpenSolaris kernel. Download here. Elsewhere, here are some first impressions on the just-released Nexenta OS alpha 1.

Sun today released its next generation filesystem, ZFS a few minutes ago by pushing out the "community" (i.e. testing) build 27 of OpenSolaris in source and binary form. You can take a look at the homepage, documentation, source code tour, and a "getting started" screencast demo.

Oracle selects the Solaris 10 Operating System as its preferred Open Source 64-bit development and deployment environment.

The Nexenta OS project has released its first publically available release. NexentaOS pre-alpha 1 has been released (also trying to beat this, I guess). You can download it from this page. This release contains OpenSolaris kernel build 26, GNOME 2.12.1, GNOME Office, Xorg 6.8.2, and much more. Update by AS: Screenshots!

NexentaOS, Debian-based GNU/Solaris, has opened a pilot-program. "We'll open Nexenta web developer portal completely for the general public by mid-November. Today we are launching a Pilot Program. Solaris developers and the entire OpenSolaris community - you are welcome to participate in the Pilot!"