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> The assertion that Oracle no longer allows you to download and use Solaris 10 for free is completely FALSE

Read the licence agreement! "Please remember, your right to use Solaris acquired as a download is limited to a trial of 90 days, unless you acquire a service contract for the downloaded Software."

The changes that Oracle made to the licence agreement are best highlighted at http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1120

Solaris under Sun had a chance. Solaris under Oracle will fade away to some unknown unimportant Oracle byproduct.

...so we may as well all just cut to the chase and declare OpenSolaris dead.

This is absolutely what is happening. From that post I linked to:

I once advocated this kind of self-implosion tactic back in the Sun days. The reason was to re-organize the OpenSolaris leadership to be more engaged and industry focused. That was a good idea back in the days when I had faith that Sun would "do the right thing". However, those times have past. Oracle has made it clear that it either controls things or it doesn't... there is no give and take. I don't think we can demolish the structure and believe that Oracle will re-organize in such a way as to give the community more power. It was a long shot with Sun anyway.

However, the most important tidbit he reveals lower in his post:

We're in no worse a position right now than we were during the Sun days. They didn't communicate, we had no visibility or impact on the OpenSolaris distribution, etc. Don't fall into the lie that things are now "worse" than they were... they aren't. Its status quo. The difference is that the OGB is no longer composed of Sun insiders who can get a sense of control from hallway conversations and are now as blind and weak as those of us in the community always have been.

My apologies to Ben Rockwood for raping his blog post of content, but this is /. and no one reads anything linked to apparently.

Ben Rockwood also blogged about this. The open source nature of Open Solaris shall henceforth be called to action...

The end of the month is here and OpenSolaris 2010.03 is no where in site and those I've asked on the inside are unable to say.
This might be a good time to catch up on non-Sun/Oracle distros such as Nexenta, Schillix, and Belenix.

IPMI remote management security is worrisome.

There are Linux utilities for IPMI. It's definitely worthwhile running "ipmiutil discover" on any LAN you control, to find out if anything out there speaks IPMI. It's also worthwhile monitoring your data center's networks for anything happening on UDP ports 663 and 664. If you're not using IPMI, make sure no one else is.

A big problem with IPMI is that the shipped hardware defaults really matter. If someone ships you a NIC card with IPMI enabled and the password known, you are 0wned at a very low level. IPMI boards offer various levels of authentication, some of which offer good cryptographic security. But one of the options is "no authentication".

A deeper problem is the possibility that NIC chips might have a default backdoor password built in. Many NIC chips now are designed in China.

Understand how much you can do via IPMI. You can turn the machine on and off remotely. You can force a reboot. You can change the boot settings. You can change the MAC address. You can override the front panel power and reset switches.(!) You can lock out the keyboard, blank the screen, set up a connection which the computer sees as a hard-wired keyboard, and boot from the LAN. The operating system isn't involved in any of this; it's taking place at a level below that of the main CPU.

Dell's guidance on IPMI is terrifying. See Figure 3, where IPMI over LAN is being enabled with username "root", no password. This sort of thing is common. The default password on Dell PowerEdge servers is "calvin", on Sun Fire servers its "changeme", in both cases the user is "root"."

If you try to do it right, turning on all the crypto and using unique random keys for each chassis, someone has to manually type in the encryption key in hex on each new server. Then you need a remote management program which securely holds all the keys. How many shops really do that?

Blog response by Ben Rockwood - Quite a good read if you want some facts in your stories. http://cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1047

Until recently IBM had made orders of magnitude greater contributions to the Open Source community than Sun.

Prove it. There was an EU study in 2006 that analyzed the corporate contributions to Debian. Sun was the largest with about 4 times the peron months attributed to it than IBM who came in second place.

That's only what came with Debian and doesn't count open sourcing Solaris or Java or any of the other projects they recently open sourced.

A different view is this old post from Ben Rockwood that they contribute equally but in different ways. Even if that were true, that's like your rich friend and really really rich friend donating the same amount of money to charity.

I think IBM gets way too much credit because they got sued by SCO. Remember. IBM didn't come in to save Linux because SCO sued Linux, SCO sued IBM.

I've switched over to Netbeans a long time ago. One of the reasons I like open source software is because it's free. Doing mainly web development and sometimes swing apps, Netbeans rocks and I don't have to buy any plugins to do what I need.

ZFS ftw http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=729

There are a lot of people who find Splunk very impressive.

Take Corey Shields who runs OSL (Open Source Labs). OSL hosts many of the world's largest Open Source Projects: Linux Kernel, Firefox, Open Office, debian, etc.
http://staff.osuosl.org/~cshields/?p=139

or perhaps Ben Rockwood sysadmin extraordinaire as well as OpenSolaris advocate:
http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id= 637

Not sure why your browser is slow on your laptop. Take a look at demo.splunk.com . Zippy on every browser I've tried.

You're so full of shit. Seriously, WTF!

How come there aren't any real apps up? How come you aren't doing anything useful in that screenshot? In a perfect world Windows could be skinned, and all the apps would conform to your new specification of how widgets look, what font's are used, what colors you want, etc. But that is definitely not the case with Windows, I've tried and given up. In the end it's not even close to worth the hassle.

Though Linux isn't much better. Start throwing in Motif apps, KDE/QT apps, Gnome/GTK apps, base X apps and it also stops conforming to your wishes. Though the control is available in an X environment to tune most of this it generally isn't worth it, and certainly is out of the realm of knowledge of your typical Linux/Unix "user." Though in *nix it is possible to set up a minimal and attractive (like your screenshot) environment, and just use a few transparent terminal windows to keep the environment clean and beautiful. Have a look at thisCuddletech screenshot for an example.

So take your lame non-functional screenshot of Windows XP and shove it.

Theres Enlightenment being packaged for Solaris according to one of the developers for Open solaris. http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/

Maybe then it wont be so bad for the end user either.

http://cuddletech.com/ So make a better one. ;)

OpenSolaris will be a full, buildable system with as few components as possible (mainly drivers) available only as binary when it launches this quarter. The pilot program is already testing and building the code (Ben Rockwood, for example) and has started thinking laterally about new potential distributions like PPC.

This is a pretty interesting rebuttal from one of the OpenSolaris developers to what an HP Exec said about the system. May address some of your open development concerns. I thought it was great to see that the OpenSolaris movement already had an outspoken developer that can fly off the handle and curse. Seems like they're off to a good start to being just a regular open source joe :)

Bryan Cantrill, one of the DTrace developers wrote this blog entry as a general introduction to the source code layout and also to DTrace. This post by Adam Leventhal goes into some more detail.

82678 lines of C were made public. No registration, no click through license before download. The OpenSolaris FAQ is pretty good btw, and there's also a roadmap page.

According to this blog (the entry dated 15:43), those in the pilot program (more than 100 developers out side of Sun) have today gotten access to the entire Solaris source base, and have already built their own version - screen shot.

Bryan Cantrill, one of the DTrace developers wrote this blog entry as a general introduction to the source code layout and also to DTrace. This post by Adam Leventhal goes into some more detail.

82678 lines of C were made public. No registration, no click through license before download. The OpenSolaris FAQ is pretty good btw, and there's also a roadmap page.

According to this blog (the entry dated 15:43), those in the pilot program (more than 100 developers out side of Sun) have today gotten access to the entire Solaris source base, and have already built their own version - screen shot.

You've been blogged! Check out the reply he posted.

Oh, and another thing...

Check out this entertaining response to HP (thanks James Gosling).

So why does it have to be "Linux VS everything else" (like Windows, Solaris, xBSD, etc)? Why can't it be "Linux AND everything else"? I think there's room for everything...right tool for the job and all that.

Just a thought.

It's specifically a reply to some verbal manure from HP, but it cuts through a lot of the ignorance and hostility here, including your own troll which has been modded Interesting due to the current Sun-basshing fashion here.

Try here for instructions on how to use TrueType fonts in Solaris. It's basically the same as using any other font: throw them in a directly, make a 'fonts.dir', then xset +fp .

Anti-aliasing isn't in Xsun yet to my knowledge, though. They added Xrender support in one of the HW updates to Solaris 9 (4/03, maybe? I forget), but anti-aliasing for Xft isn't there yet, as they say vaguely here.

You can always use XFree86 on Solaris, though I've never tried it.