Slashdot Mirror

The server at http://www.genunix.org/, where this OpenSolaris 2008.11 ISO is hosted, is responding rather slowly right now (indirect Slashdotting?). So I want to point out that if you'd like to download this build and try it for yourself, you can get it as a torrent here.

I agree with those people advocating ZFS.
It is insanely simple (and powerful) to administer.
Shrink, grow, create, snapshot, delete, manage filesystems intuitively with power and flexibility seldom seen in ANYTHING else.
Seriously, read the PDF below to see what you're giving up by using anything else:
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/docs/zfs_last.pdf
http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/
http://www.genunix.org/

There are several OS distributions besides OpenSolaris / Solaris that use ZFS, NEXENTA, FreeBSD, Schillix, Belenix, et. al.;
NEXENTA uses most of the open source type of desktop / utility applications instead of the Solaris style ones, I think others do that to some degree as well. IDK if MythTV and your HW drivers run under FreeBSD 7 but if it did that'd be perfect.

There is a simple solution to getting it to be the storage drive for LINUX, though -- run a virtual machine under LINUX and in the VM run FreeBSD or OpenSolaris or whatever with a ZFS filesystem given full control of the devices making up the ZFS storage pool. Run the LINUX OS off either a distinct drive or partition so that it doesn't get interfered with by the ZFS / other OS.
Share the ZFS over NFS between the OS versions in the host/guest via their VMed networking and that should have plenty of performance for HTPC use. You'll lose about 1GB RAM or so for doing the VM thing, and you'd probably need 1 core of CPU free to handle it and still give the other OS good performance, but those aren't entirely unreasonable tradeoffs today.

Are you serious? You're also the one who made the completely unsubstantiated claim that NetBSD is more portable than Linux (which I refuted and you had no answer to). So you seem like a troll.

So, what evidence do you have to back up this new claim? Here's something interesting. Both Solaris and Linux are recently implementing NUMA text replication. This is what the diff looks like for Solaris:

http://hg.genunix.org/onnv-gate.hg/rev/1b5c93035912
  28 files changed, 2508 insertions(+), 314 deletions(-)

And this is what the Linux one looks like:

http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=118552585814804&w=2
18 files changed, 812 insertions(+), 61 deletions(-)

So the Linux implementation is like 1/3 the size and touches 50% fewer files.

So, why is it that you say Solaris is cleaner than Linux? I doubt you've even read the code.

Choose one of the distros below - Schillix, BeleniX and Nexenta all have live CDs available in order to try
things out.

Solaris Express
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/solaris-expres s/get.jsp

Schillix
http://schillix.berlios.de/

BeleniX
http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/ belenix_home.html

NexentaOS
http://www.gnusolaris.org/

marTux
http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~mbeinsx/marTux/

Well, Solaris 10 is a proprietary Sun product. It's no surprise that there are additional or conflicting terms for it. There are plenty of analogues to use; for many years, BSDI sold (without source, and under very restrictive terms) various derivatives of the open source BSD operating system. Perfectly acceptable, and when Solaris 11 comes out I'm sure it will have terms different from those of the OpenSolaris technology too. The license allows this, and you shouldn't be surprised by it.

If the Solaris license makes you unhappy, don't use Solaris. Use one of the other OpenSolaris-based distributions instead; each distributor is free to offer you any terms he or she likes, provided that the source files they use that come from OpenSolaris are made available to you. You really should go read the license.

I guess I have to actually download the disks to know for certain what I can or can't do as the information from their website seems contradictory.

Actually this term exists partly because a lot of the software included in Solaris is open source, and you have additional rights to that software that aren't specified on that page. Do you really want to read 500 pages detailing all the licenses and what they cover? Especially since many of them are familiar licenses you probably know and love, like BSD and GPL? I sure don't want to.

Wow, thats not very open, and what is the point if the source is available?

You've answered your own question...the parts of Solaris that are open don't need to be reverse-engineered. The parts that aren't, well, Sun can license those under whatever terms they like. Again, if you don't like the Solaris license, you have a choice of distributions, just like you have with other open source operating systems.

My, a bit touchy about how people may talk about us, are we?

If you look at the Solaris Express (for Solaris 11) license terms, you'll notice that this has been removed. Again, Solaris 10 predates OpenSolaris and is not an open source operating system. Of course the benchmarking term does not apply to source or binaries you receive via OpenSolaris, either, only to the official Sun distribution.

I still wonder how supportive Sun is of open source. Do they only support it if they have little choice and then only if you use it in a way that will not benefit anyone else?

Check out the other distributions available already and other projects people are starting to work on. Sun gets nothing directly from these - neither revenue, nor opportunity to sell services or other software. Of course Sun does benefit, too; it gets increased mindshare for Solaris and perhaps a larger installed base of Solaris-compatible operating systems. But to say that these uses don't benefit anyone other than Sun is just wrong.

Reminds me of the Samuel Johnson qoute: "...like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

They are not happy with the name, though.

So, did you check this, or are you just bullshitting? Oh, look, you're just bullshitting aren't you? For instance, let's see. www.opensolaris.org, there's a download link, with some blurb and ... links to various things, including http://www.genunix.org/mirror/index.html which has tar files. Or of course you could have a (free, yes, really) login on opensolaris.org and got it from there or the SDLC.

But, hey, it's Sun and it's fashionable to slag them off in your little cult isn't it?

See OpenSolaris.org. There are two other options: The Sun Download Center and genunix.org No registration is required.