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OpenSolaris Code Released

njcoder writes "C|net's news.com.com has reported that Sun Microsystems is releasing parts of the OpenSolaris code today licensed under the OSI-approved CDDL . The release consistes of over 5 million lines of code for the base system OS/Net (kernel and networking). OpenSolaris is based on Solaris 10, the current version of Sun's Unix Operating System. Back in January, Sun released the code for DTrace, a dynamic tracing tool for analyzing and debugging kernel and userland events. DTrace is one of the big features in Solaris 10. Some other highlights include the GRUB bootloader, SMF (Service Management Facility) which replaces init.d scripts, it starts up processes in parallel for faster boots (7 second boot on a dual opteron workstation I think that was the setup) as well as providing features for automatically restarting. OpenSolaris provides support for x86/x86-64 processors as well as Sparc. The Blastware guys are working on Polaris which is an OpenSolaris port to PowerPC. Sun has been working on opening Solaris for over a year now. The OpenSolaris project started with a pilot group of Sun and non-Sun users. During the pilot program a lot of info including screenshots could be found on various OpenSolaris member blogs. (My favorite is Ben Rockwood's blog). Teamware is the source code management system Sun uses for Solaris and OpenSolaris. Which was designed by Larry McVoy (now of BitKeeper) while he was at sun. No word yet on if Teamware will be available for OpenSolaris developers or not. Sun also uses CollabNet for it's Open Source project websites so that might be a possibility as well."

362 comments

  1. Rock on! by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Interesting
    YES! This completely rocks! Check it out:



    Combined with an Open Source/Forkable license, what more could a Solaris Geek want? Get out the party hats people, because this has got to be THE most awesome thing Sun has ever done!

    (I'm excited, can you tell? *Happy Dance* *Happy Dance*) :-P

    Now for the bad news. Sun has taken the tack of encouraging users to build their own system. That is a good thing. Unfortuntely, all builds require a system to bootstrap the build. At the moment, the only option is Solaris Community Edition, a non-Torrented download. (Boo!) That being said, I don't think we'll have to wait too long for the OSS community to fix that little issue. :-D
    1. Re:Rock on! by njcoder · · Score: 2, Informative

      Also check out Jim Grisanzio's blog. It explains a bit about what's been going on with the pilot program.

    2. Re:Rock on! by Khakionion · · Score: 1

      Combined with an Open Source/Forkable license, what more could a Solaris Geek want?

      I would like an LDAP user authentication client that works without needing patching out of the box.

      What? Solaris 8, 9, and 10 offered no such thing? They made my Solaris admin job a living hell?

      God, I'm glad we use Linux here at my new job, where things work upon installation, and upgrades add new features, not promised ones that weren't originally delivered.

      --
      OMG! Wau!
    3. Re:Rock on! by Nasarius · · Score: 1
      It's nice, but what are the advantages of (Open)Solaris over say, OpenBSD, which I could also afford?

      Seriously, why use OpenSolaris rather than an existing open-source OS? I'm sure there are some ideas that can be borrowed...

      --
      LOAD "SIG",8,1
    4. Re:Rock on! by m50d · · Score: 2, Funny

      Proper CD recording support because the makers understand the need for backwards compatibility, and don't go around breaking APIs just because they feel like it.

      --
      I am trolling
    5. Re:Rock on! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So fix it. It's now Open to the world. ;-)

    6. Re:Rock on! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LDAP user authentication worked out of the box (minus using ldapclient init, of course) on Solaris 10 and newer updates of Solaris 8 and 9. Sounds like you've got other issues...

    7. Re:Rock on! by grahamlee · · Score: 2, Informative
      Unfortuntely, all builds require a system to bootstrap the build. At the moment, the only option is Solaris Community Edition, a non-Torrented download. (Boo!) That being said, I don't think we'll have to wait too long for the OSS community to fix that little issue.

      Sadly, that might not necessarily be the case - OpenDarwin has been around for five years and you still need a Darwin system [including some non-free tools] to bootstrap the build. But as Solaris Express is free as in non-costworthy, I don't see any problem with downloading SE to bootstrap an OpenSlowlaris kernel build. Me, I'm still using Solaris 2,7, and 8 ;-)

    8. Re:Rock on! by elmegil · · Score: 1
      I'm sure there are some ideas that can be borrowed...

      Let's see...you can use a free (enough?) OS that had these features developed for it, or you can try to port them to some other OS and be that much further behind the development curve. Why would you do that to yourself?

      --
      7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
    9. Re:Rock on! by 0racle · · Score: 1

      Well, assuming that applications written for Solaris will also work on OpenSolaris, that would be the reason you would use this over something else.

      I wonder if Oracle 10g or 9i runs on OpenSolaris.

      --
      "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
    10. Re:Rock on! by Ravnen · · Score: 1

      I hope this will lead to desktop/laptop drivers being ported. I like Sun's Unix environment, so I'd really like to be able to run Solaris as a secondary OS on my laptop.

    11. Re:Rock on! by Nevyn · · Score: 1

      You seem to be under the impression that Solaris contains all the features that are found in Linux/FreeBSD/etc. This is not true, in fact your arguement is the main one you'd use to stay with one of the other 5 free unixen. Solaris has very little to offer, esp. if you are a normal person and DTrace means nothing to you.

      --
      ustr: Managed string API with ave. 44% overhead over strdup(), for 0-20B
    12. Re:Rock on! by 11223 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Not true. OpenDarwin images build from source under an OpenDarwin image, with only free tools.

    13. Re:Rock on! by elmegil · · Score: 3, Insightful
      So, tell me exactly which features are in Linux/FreeBSD/etc that I don't have or can't get for Solaris? Assertion that my statement is not true doesn't prove a damn thing.

      Does Solaris want to be the hacker's desktop OS? I really doubt it. Does Solaris want to be an OSS player in the data center? Absolutely. And for data center features, Solaris does very well against the competitors. If you think Sun's OSS strategy is to get joe hacker to run his OS, of course you're going to be disappointed, because you just don't get it yourself.

      --
      7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
    14. Re:Rock on! by justins · · Score: 1
      Sadly, that might not necessarily be the case - OpenDarwin has been around for five years and you still need a Darwin system [including some non-free tools] to bootstrap the build.

      There are a number of different OpenSolaris-based projects in the works which will probably allieviate this. My money is on SchilliX being ready first.

      --
      Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
    15. Re:Rock on! by acoopersmith · · Score: 1

      I hope this will lead to desktop/laptop drivers being ported. I like Sun's Unix environment, so I'd really like to be able to run Solaris as a secondary OS on my laptop.

      Since Solaris 10 defaults to Xorg on x86 machines, most video cards with open source drivers are now supported. Drivers for other laptop hardware, like wireless networking, are still needed, but a lot of Sun's engineers now run Solaris on their laptops, so getting the missing drivers ready is getting a lot of attention.

    16. Re:Rock on! by bankman · · Score: 2, Funny
      Proper CD recording support because the makers understand the need for backwards compatibility, and don't go around breaking APIs just because they feel like it.

      Joerg Schilling, is that you?

      --
      I feel so sig.
    17. Re:Rock on! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > (I'm excited, can you tell? *Happy Dance* *Happy Dance*) :-P

      Now if that doesn't indicate the Solaris demographic is changing, I don't know what would...

    18. Re:Rock on! by cpeterso · · Score: 1


      I wonder if the Sun Studio 10 Compilers can be used to compile Linux? Sun went out of their way to make Solaris compile with gcc.

    19. Re:Rock on! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Seriously, why use OpenSolaris rather than an existing open-source OS?"

      Seriously, do some research.

    20. Re:Rock on! by kbmccarty · · Score: 4, Funny

      Now for the bad news. Sun has taken the tack of encouraging users to build their own system.

      Countdown to Debian GNU/Solaris in T minus 10... 9...

      --
      - Kevin B. McCarty
    21. Re:Rock on! by Nevyn · · Score: 1
      So, tell me exactly which features are in Linux/FreeBSD/etc that I don't have or can't get for Solaris?

      The obvious point is that the Solaris network stack isn't as good as either, one of the problems being that it makes a lot of tradeoffs for it's traditional large customers. Sure, they might well appreciate their specific hack (like a recent Solris to Linux user I spoke to who was unhappy because Solaris "respected" the write() message bounderies down to the TCP packet level, and Linux didn't) ... but they also like things that go fast in the general case.

      Solaris carries around a lot of baggage like, STREAMS and doors. Not having this kind of crap is a feature, and also helps the above point of doing the right thing in the cases people care about -- I've seen benchmarks that on Uni-proccessor machines Linux process creation is faster than Solaris thread creation.

      From a user POV, Solaris isn't what the majority are using ... and the userspace is crap compared to Linux. Yes, you can manually install more or less a complete Linux userspace to get the usable tools ... but, as you said, why wouldn't you just go with the one that works by default?

      From a managemant POV, Linux can be got, as the default OS, from multiple HW vendors and you can choose from multiple software vendors who've been around for a significant amount of time. There are also thriving "communities" around Linux so that even if your vendors dies, you are pretty much guanteed not to be completely screwed. Solaris has Sun.

      From a developer POV, then off the top of my head you have TCP_CORK, TCP_DEFER_ACCEPT, mount binds (and namespaces) and SELinux (trusted Solaris doesn't count, as that still isn't available as source ... and AIUI has no recent release of any kind, and noone is using it) ... and of course you have the users and all the other developers. Oh, yeh, and you have years of open communication and the ability to participate in the direction of the OS ... which if you're lucky you might have most of the former, and half the later in Solaris "any day now".

      If you think Sun's OSS strategy is to get joe hacker to run his OS, of course you're going to be disappointed, because you just don't get it yourself.

      Ahh I see Solaris isn't there for the "joe hacker", just for the data center ... funny thing is though, the people working in the data center's aren't grown in huge vats at MIT. And of course, I am kind of wondering, if "joe hacker" doesn't want it who the hell is going to write the code for it? Or are you still under the impression that in the battle Sun vs. the rest of the world they are, or will somehow start, winning?

      To be fair, I'm not sure that some of Sun doesn't want Solaris to be a "joe hacker" OS ... what I do know is that if it isn't, it'll fail horribly. And unless they succeed spectacularly, I'll hardly have to care at all.

      --
      ustr: Managed string API with ave. 44% overhead over strdup(), for 0-20B
    22. Re:Rock on! by grahamlee · · Score: 1

      Firstly, not true. You need xcodebuild to build some of the components, and xcodebuild isn't free. Secondly, you appear to have deliberately avoided any point this thread contained: you require Darwin to build Darwin, as you require Solaris to build Solaris. The OP was stating that the latter was a shame and would probably be fixed, the FCP observed that it ain't necessarily so.

    23. Re:Rock on! by ozbird · · Score: 1

      Countdown to Debian GNU/Solaris in T minus 10... 9...

      Years?

    24. Re:Rock on! by elmegil · · Score: 1
      You haven't named a single feature that fits your original claim. Nice job.

      A network stack DIFFERENCE certainly could be significant. But that's not a feature that Linux has and Solaris doesn't. They differ, but both have them.

      Not having something is not a feature, no matter how desperately you'd like it to be.

      Yes, you can manually install more or less a complete Linux userspace to get the usable tools

      I have to "manually install" lots of things from Red Hat to get the environment I want too (can you say "telnet"?) Solaris 10 includes the vast majority of commonly used F/OSS software on the distribution media. How that's any harder than the media for Red Hat or SuSE is a mystery to me.

      even if your vendors dies, you are pretty much guanteed not to be completely screwed.

      So basically the fact that it's now OSS and you could maintain it yourself means nothing? I thought that was one of the reasons everyone has been bitching at Sun to GO OSS for years now.

      "Joe Hacker" is meant in terms of the "typical" Linux hacker, who has time and energy and drive to customize his/her OS to the Nth degree. 90% of the world is not like that, and clearly those people don't drive all or even most of the purchasing decisions out there, else Linux would have already taken over the world. Now, is Solaris usable for most "normal" users? Yes. Does it have some good features for developers? Yes. Is it the perfectly tweaked Nth degree perfection of the Linux vision? No, if it were, it'd be Linux.

      You're just a dog in the manger. Don't like it? Don't use it. Go somewhere else, because Sun's not hurting you, and you're clearly not interested in being part of the Sun community. Ignore Sun and let them die, if you're so certain that's their fate.

      --
      7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
    25. Re:Rock on! by Curtman · · Score: 1

      Since Solaris 10 defaults to Xorg on x86 machines, most video cards with open source drivers are now supported.

      Wasn't there still some problem like the DRI DRM not being ported or something? This didn't work for me when I tried a few months back. I'll certainly be trying again soon though. :)

    26. Re:Rock on! by Heretik · · Score: 1

      The GNU/Slashdot moderators still GNU/think this incredibly retarded GNU/GNU joke is funny? It wasn't even GNU/funny three years ago, it sure as GNU/hell isn't funny now.

      Look! I can put "GNU/" in front of random words too! Do I get a funny mod?

    27. Re:Rock on! by acoopersmith · · Score: 1

      Wasn't there still some problem like the DRI DRM not being ported or something?

      DRI & DRM are not yet ported, but are being worked on. Without them you lose some hardware acceleration. (Though you don't need them for full hardware acceleration on nVIDIA cards if you use nVIDIA's recently released Solaris x86/x64 driver.)

      This [link to Phil Brown's community agpgart driver] didn't work for me when I tried a few months back.

      Solaris now includes its own agpgart driver, based in part on Phil's driver, as of the Solaris development build released today, and provides the source as well in OpenSolaris - see http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/usr/src/uts /i86pc/io/agpgart/

    28. Re:Rock on! by Curtman · · Score: 1

      Solaris now includes its own agpgart driver

      Damn you. I was sure I was going to get something productive done this week. Looks like it's just been reclassified Solaris playtime.

    29. Re:Rock on! by RockWolf · · Score: 1

      Apparently not.

      --
      February 9th, 2009 8:55pm: Slashdot becomes self-aware.
    30. Re:Rock on! by JonAnderson · · Score: 1
      The obvious point is that the Solaris network stack isn't as good as either, one of the problems being that it makes a lot of tradeoffs for it's traditional large customers. Sure, they might well appreciate their specific hack (like a recent Solris to Linux user I spoke to who was unhappy because Solaris "respected" the write() message bounderies down to the TCP packet level, and Linux didn't) ... but they also like things that go fast in the general case.
      Bullshit. The S10 tcp/ip stack is fantastic. Are you talking single stream performance or aggregate throughput because fireengine scales almost perfectly. And your write() message annecdote just shows how little you know about tcp. Solaris will also aggregate writes if the cost of this is amortized by the lower networks costs (packet count, rtt)
    31. Re:Rock on! by greenrd · · Score: 1
      I think you're missing the point. GNU/Solaris is a credible possibility, not a silly juxtaposition.

    32. Re:Rock on! by njcoder · · Score: 1
      " I think you're missing the point. GNU/Solaris is a credible possibility, not a silly juxtaposition."

      These people sure think so :)

    33. Re:Rock on! by joto · · Score: 1
      Not having something is not a feature, no matter how desperately you'd like it to be.

      At the moment, I'm not having diarrhea. I consider that a feature, and not a bug. (STREAMS under un*x-like operating systems is comparable to diarrhea in this respect...)

    34. Re:Rock on! by elmegil · · Score: 1

      not having a bug is not a feature. Otherwise every program ever written would be a mass of amazing features.

      --
      7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
    35. Re:Rock on! by joto · · Score: 1

      But what if all your competitors have the same bug, and you have somehow managed to avoid it? I would still consider that a feature. And having a better design that avoids bugs or misfeatures, is definitely a feature.

    36. Re:Rock on! by m50d · · Score: 1

      No, I'm just a poor user trying to burn my cds in linux. I now understand it's a problem with my specific drive (Cyberdrive CW058D) but it worked under 2.4 with ide-scsi, it doesn't work under 2.6 either with the same version of cdrecord that worked under 2.4 or withthe latest alpha (I've tried with and without ide-scsi), and cdrdao doesn't do all I want. All in all I'm more than a little pissed off with both of them, but since the same version works under 2.4 (and there's linus screaming there's no reason at all to use ide-scsi, I have a fucking reason my fucking cd burner doesn't fucking work without it), I'm more pissed off with Linus.

      --
      I am trolling
    37. Re:Rock on! by Nevyn · · Score: 1
      Bullshit. The S10 tcp/ip stack is fantastic.

      I only heard about FireEngine today, I'm somewhat surprised that Sun haven't marketed it. The documentation I've seen for FireEngine suggests that they've basically rewritten large bits of it, esp. with regard to BSD APIs, nodoubt to catch up with OSS. I haven't seen any benchmarks yet though, and given (as I said before) S10 doesn't support TCP_CORK/TCP_DEFER_ACCEPT I have a hard time believing it's as good.

      And your write() message annecdote just shows how little you know about tcp.

      You didn't understand what I wrote then. I have advised a client who have had "working" Solaris code that called write() where the data was in the 1-9 bytes range and the clients abortted if the read() didn't get all or nothing. This apparently "worked" in Solaris because the TCP stack didn't merge data into packets optimally, instead it would leave a few bytes of the end of the current packet so it could put the "whole message" into a TCP packet.

      This was default behaviour, and their request was that Linux also "honour the message boundries". I had to explain to them that the Solaris was considered a bug, and they should just fix their client applications.

      Obviously hacks in the TCP stack like this don't come for free, so I'd be interested if the new "super" FireEngine stack still does this.

      --
      ustr: Managed string API with ave. 44% overhead over strdup(), for 0-20B
    38. Re:Rock on! by elmegil · · Score: 1
      Yeah, because I've never gotten a bug in Linux code, because it has such a clean concise design.

      Not.

      --
      7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
    39. Re:Rock on! by evilviper · · Score: 1
      Proper CD recording support because the makers understand the need for backwards compatibility, and don't go around breaking APIs just because they feel like it.

      He asked about OPENBSD, NOT LINUX.

      As far back as I can remember, OpenBSD has always had a perfectly good SCSI layer, which worked with cdrecord. Linux is the one where SCSI and IDE access are mutually exclusive, where you can't get any better than 16X record speeds due to lack of DMA support, where it's regularly broken, and incompatible changes are common.

      I would say that OpenBSD is second only to Solaris as far as cdrecord is concerned. The primary developers of OpenBSD love SCSI nearly as much as Jorg does.
      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
    40. Re:Rock on! by htd2 · · Score: 1

      Dtrace and no its not an idea thats easily borrowed unless you envisage re-writing the OpenBSD kernel as an easy option.

      The Solaris 10 IP stack ditto.

      Solaris Service Manager ditto.

    41. Re:Rock on! by JonAnderson · · Score: 1

      TCP_CORK support integrated into Nevada build 12 so should be in Solaris Express and probably a Solaris 10 update. Fireengine is a lot more than additional API support. Locking is massively reduced, scalability and throughput are massively increased. It scales connections across available CPU's and uses serialization queues to avoid locking where possible. You can take a look now ;-) As for TCP, I did understand what you wrote. TCP is a byte stream protocol so the preservation of message boundaries is neither here nor there. As I said, the s10 stack will amortize packet cost with the cost of reconstituting messages. You rightly point out that it's an application defect to rely on undefined behaviour (the Solaris behaviour is just an artifact of the implementation which has also changed in s10). Was the client not using Nagle?

    42. Re:Rock on! by Nevyn · · Score: 1
      TCP_CORK support integrated into Nevada build 12 so should be in Solaris Express and probably a Solaris 10 update.

      Very cool, while I'm on a roll ... what about TCP_DEFER_ACCEPT too ?:)

      Was the client not using Nagle?

      The client was using Nagle, in fact they hadn't even heard of TCP_NODELAY when I told them they could work around their problem on Linux (assuming a perfect network) in the short term by enabling that (thus disabling Nagle).

      --
      ustr: Managed string API with ave. 44% overhead over strdup(), for 0-20B
    43. Re:Rock on! by JonAnderson · · Score: 1
      Very cool, while I'm on a roll ... what about TCP_DEFER_ACCEPT too ?:)
      Well, I am going to have a think about this one for a bit longer. On the plus side, it's good for linux source compatability. On the negative side, it feels like a protocol violation to me and I am not sure if what it buys you outweighs. It's trivial to implement so I might file an RFE to do this (if I can convince myself that it's acceptable behaviour ;-)
    44. Re:Rock on! by Nevyn · · Score: 1
      it feels like a protocol violation to me and I am not sure if what it buys you outweighs

      The client side can't see a difference (everything is SYN+ACKed, just that the info. isn't passed onto the user space app.), and the server side obviously knows it's happening so shouldn't be doing it on a protocol where the server is expected to respond with a banner first.

      On the other hand, it's probably not as big of a win as TCP_CORK and it's trivial to work around if it doesn't exist (you just don't call setsockopt()).

      --
      ustr: Managed string API with ave. 44% overhead over strdup(), for 0-20B
  2. let the driver flood gates open! by emptybody · · Score: 4, Interesting

    now maybe we will see some driver development for all the cool hardware that is out there?

    --
    comment directly in my journal
    1. Re:let the driver flood gates open! by zzqzzq_zzq · · Score: 3, Interesting

      When things like the 'dad' & 'uata' (IDE drivers), and 'todsg' drivers are still in the closed source tarballs, I'm not hopeful for the 'open'ness of 'opensolaris' (Come on, they can't release drivers for their own hardware clocks?! (todsg))

    2. Re:let the driver flood gates open! by Nerant · · Score: 3, Informative

      Believe it or not, there are numerous legal issues that Sun has to work through in order to ensure code that is open sourced doesn't get anyone in trouble.

      Be patient. They're working on it. Or would you rather they open source some code they don't have the right to, and get people who see that code into trouble?

      There is still alot of work to be done, but it is a huge first step.

      For more, take a look at the roadmap at

      http://opensolaris.org/os/about/roadmap/

      --
      Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
    3. Re:let the driver flood gates open! by hritcu · · Score: 1

      One year is not too much time to wait for a great open source operating system. Not when you are using Linux :)

      --
      If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
    4. Re:let the driver flood gates open! by Octorian · · Score: 1

      You know, nothing ever prevented anyone from writing Solaris drivers back when the OS was closed. Sun had plenty of publicly available documentation and sample code, freely available on their website, for driver development.

      Solaris has very good cross-version device driver compatability. A binary driver module for Solaris 7 may work on something as new as Solaris 9 (maybe even 10), provided that it was built for the same architecture (i.e. 32-bit vs. 64-bit).

      Meanwhile, Linux kernel modules are seldom compatable (once compiled into a binary) across minor sub-version variants.

    5. Re:let the driver flood gates open! by JonAnderson · · Score: 1

      If it was written to the DDI/DKI properly then it is guaranteed to work. I am always amazed that most slashdotter don't appreciate this....

    6. Re:let the driver flood gates open! by cahiha · · Score: 1

      You know, nothing ever prevented anyone from writing Solaris drivers back when the OS was closed.

      What's the point of writing open source drivers for a proprietary operating system? As long Solaris was closed source, it was Sun's responsibility to develop their own drivers.

      Meanwhile, Linux kernel modules are seldom compatable (once compiled into a binary) across minor sub-version variants.

      While I don't necessarily agree with it, that is by design rather than by accident.

  3. But, does it run Linux? by hey · · Score: 2, Funny

    Well, does it?

    1. Re:But, does it run Linux? by Tpenta · · Score: 1

      That question sounds reminiscent of a questin that was asked of almost all hardware 15 years ago.

      Does it run MSDOS?

      I hope that's not a portent.

      Tp.

    2. Re:But, does it run Linux? by Zemplar · · Score: 0, Troll

      Actually, soon enough you can run all the Linux applications via project Janus. So then, who cares about this so called 'Linux kernel'?

    3. Re:But, does it run Linux? by ubuntu · · Score: 1

      But, does it run Linux?

      Forget Linux. Does it run Java? Oh, wait...

  4. opensolaris is a trap by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    this code is a trap to scuttle linux development. sun will be looking to sue coders who they feel copy concepts and code from opensolaris into gpl'd codebases. do not look at the opensolaris code is you are a linux coder or code in gpl'd software. protect yourself and your code.

    1. Re:opensolaris is a trap by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Right, yeah, they can totally sue people for looking at code released under an OSI-approved license.

    2. Re:opensolaris is a trap by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So i cannot look at free software source code? Well then it is the end of linux for me since i cannot risk getting sued for looking @ linux source code.

    3. Re:opensolaris is a trap by ingenthr · · Score: 1

      This is a trollish comment. Anyone who looks at the FAQ on the site and/or looks at the time/effort put into this will see Sun is trying to build upon the community around Solaris, not tear apart other communities.

      Also, my understanding is you can cross pollenate ideas (that aren't patent encumbered) and/or contribute your own thoughts to both communities. Copyright (and joint copyright) of actual lines of code is where things get more complicated. It is, however, a false assertion that looking at OpenSolaris will open one's work to OpenSolaris.

      It's the GPL that has 'viral' aspects. I'm not saying that the GPL is right or wrong in this area. It is different.

      This whole area is a big venn diagram of copyright law, patent law, license agreements and those who are willing or not to persue litigation.

    4. Re:opensolaris is a trap by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      seems to me solaris coders could also be accused of such copying from GPL code, and the FSF has been known to sue too. If Sun starts frivolous suits just to dominate the Unix/Unixlike world, that will kill off OpenSolaris faster than anything else, it would become a dead skunk that no one wants to be near.

    5. Re:opensolaris is a trap by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      your comment fully illustrates your ignorance.

    6. Re:opensolaris is a trap by arivanov · · Score: 1

      You may be right as Sun has payed SCO to use their crap, but not to rerelease it under another license (and OSS to boot).

      As anyone who has had to suffer from admin-ing OpenServer the idea of parallel non-init.d style startup launching is not new. In fact it is very old.

      SCO had it first.

      Before touching this "open" thing I will spend at least several days comparing this bit to the old OpenServer bit. And if they have as much in common as I suspect the best thing to do here will be to duck and wait for SCO legal missiles to land on a legitimate target.

      In btw, that will be a nice way for McNealy to pay a bit more to SCO to top up his previous anti-linux contribution without causing undue screams in the community. All legit. Stolen code. Out of court settlement. Rather large one...

      --
      Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
      http://www.sigsegv.cx/
    7. Re:opensolaris is a trap by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Watch out, the black helicopters are coming for you dude.

  5. Vaporware no more! by Wazukkithemaster · · Score: 1

    I sincerely hope that all the people that were shouting "Vaporware fuh fuh fuh its Vaporware!" (or in some instances Vapourware) will finally be satisfied... I dont really have a problem with the fact that they said it, because at the time it was technically true, but now its time to give credit where credit is due.

    --
    Live according to the Categorical Imperative. If the Categorical Imperative tells you not to live by it... ignore it
    1. Re:Vaporware no more! by njcoder · · Score: 4, Funny

      You can search the source code online. I did a search for fuck, shit and a couple of other words. Within 5,000,000 lines of code no hits for fuck and only 1 for shit. I think I understand why it took them so long to get the code ready :)

    2. Re:Vaporware no more! by mogrify · · Score: 3, Informative

      heh... bet that gets taken out right quick. http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/usr/src/cmd /volmgt/vold/dev_rmscsi.c thanks for the tip.

      --
      perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
    3. Re:Vaporware no more! by frodo+from+middle+ea · · Score: 1
      I searched for FIXME and GOTO.

      Surprizinly only 93 matches for FIXME , but a hell lot more for goto..

      --
      for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
    4. Re:Vaporware no more! by Rakshasa+Taisab · · Score: 2, Informative

      Though it won't satisfy those of us who have been shouting "Vapourlicense!"

      --
      - These characters were randomly selected.
    5. Re:Vaporware no more! by pe1rxq · · Score: 1

      If you listen to pretty much anybody not in the teaching bussiness you will soon find that goto is not such a bad thing....

      --
      Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
    6. Re:Vaporware no more! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ... and most of the 'fixme' lines appear to be in perl, grub, and man. Interesting that the first two are from the open source community...

    7. Re:Vaporware no more! by mrjatsun · · Score: 1
      Your right! OpenSolaris, Apache, Firefox/ Thunderbird/ Mozilla. They all have the bad open source licenses..


      When they were talking about going down to 4 open source licenses, I fired an e-mail off asking if they would keep all company, organization, product, group, etc. names off the license. Specifically, I wanted to know if the GNU folks had to have GNU in the license name. You can guess what the response was... Sometimes I wonder if the motive is the G or the PL for some of the folks.


      I like the GPL. But is an open source license which is good some some things. It's not the answer for everything. I personally would use it for a project starting from scratch. IMO, not as useful for an established source base.


      disclaimer: I work for Sun.

    8. Re:Vaporware no more! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Linux is written in C. When you require a nonlocal exit from a loop without dealing with the overhead of a function or even sentinel variable checks (I usually use "bail"), goto is just the thing. Nothing wrong with forward goto's. Backward gotos to "redo" a loop are kind of icky, but also not wrong.

      When "GOTO Considered Harmful" was written, it was THE flow-control structure. Only unthinking idiots actually believe it is never Ever EVER to be used.

      Using goto in C++ is an almost universally bad idea if it ever crosses blocks though. Destructors don't get called. Technical reasons like that usually have little to do with "I'm such an engineer, I know goto sucks" attitude.

    9. Re:Vaporware no more! by snorklewacker · · Score: 2, Funny

      > specifically, I wanted to know if the GNU folks had to have GNU in the license name. You can guess what the response was...

      Flames like "the G stands for General" followed by colorful aspersions on your intelligence?

      --
      I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
    10. Re:Vaporware no more! by mrjatsun · · Score: 1
      I stand corrected in my semantics, but not the intent.. :-)


      http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html


      What I should have typed was would they support not have GNU in the nextgen license name i.e. "GNU General Public License".

    11. Re:Vaporware no more! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You searched for GOTO and not aargh, moron, or fool?

    12. Re:Vaporware no more! by ashre · · Score: 1
    13. Re:Vaporware no more! by mzs · · Score: 1

      Don't forget about XXX but remember to not count things like perl and strings, only in comments.

    14. Re:Vaporware no more! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      /usr/src/cmd/perl/5.8.4/distrib/lib/Net/ - perl - Practical Extraction and Report Language
      FTP.pm 1112 # Darn MS FTP server is a load of CRAP !!!!

      hehehe....

    15. Re:Vaporware no more! by hacker · · Score: 1

      Did you notice that more than half of that source file is completely unparsed, ignored, because of the undef at the top (the one commentedy by the 'shit')

      Looking at the rest of that code, its no wonder they need the community's help. Its a freaking mess. Whomever writes code like that needs to get back to CompSci 101.

    16. Re:Vaporware no more! by UseTheSource · · Score: 1

      The word "fuck" is in there, if you look harder...

      Have a look at line 1785 in usr/src/cmd/mdb/common/modules/genunix/typegraph.c :

      /*
      * Fucking unions...
      */

      --
      "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer." -Adolf Hitler
      "We are one Nation, we are one People." -The One 'leader'
    17. Re:Vaporware no more! by UseTheSource · · Score: 1

      I count two for the word "shit"... Have a look in usr/src/uts/common/dtrace/dtrace.c, as well.

      Hint: find and grep are your friends. :P

      --
      "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer." -Adolf Hitler
      "We are one Nation, we are one People." -The One 'leader'
    18. Re:Vaporware no more! by qbwiz · · Score: 1

      Did you notice that more than half of that source file is completely unparsed, ignored, because of the undef at the top (the one commentedy by the 'shit')
      No, I didn't. It looks to me like at most 5% of that file is ignored due to that command.

      --
      Ewige Blumenkraft.
    19. Re:Vaporware no more! by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 1

      Evidently they didn't release the hme driver without scrubbing, I'd guarantee a few fuck's in that one...

    20. Re:Vaporware no more! by Wazukkithemaster · · Score: 1

      I wish i could meta moderate the informative moderation as +1 funny... hahah. Well i guess its true... it wont satisfy them

      --
      Live according to the Categorical Imperative. If the Categorical Imperative tells you not to live by it... ignore it
    21. Re:Vaporware no more! by civilizedINTENSITY · · Score: 1

      Uh oh. Can you work on any other OSS codebase now? Or have you polluted yourself? Can you prove you didn't look at the Solaris code you searched?

    22. Re:Vaporware no more! by KieranElby · · Score: 1

      I make it 23 'XXX's and 12 'TODO's just within the main TCP file: http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/usr/src/uts /common/inet/tcp/tcp.c

    23. Re:Vaporware no more! by Paul+Jakma · · Score: 1

      Did you notice that more than half of that source file is completely unparsed, ignored, because of the undef at the top (the one commentedy by the 'shit')

      Ehm, that doesn't appear to true. Just part_to_hack() and a few other lines are left out.

      Whomever writes code like that needs to get back to CompSci 101.

      The P0_WA parts should really have been removed and left to gather dust in SCCS, however the rest of it looks ok to me at a glance - at least in terms of basic style and structure.

      --
      I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
  6. Zfs? by astrashe · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is zfs included?

    1. Re:Zfs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ZFS hasn't been released yet even to the Express builds. It should come out later this year. There is no reason to suspect that ZFS won't be part of OpenSolaris when ZFS finally comes out.

    2. Re:Zfs? by pedantic+bore · · Score: 4, Informative
      According to the feature list (http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/documenta tion/opensolaris_guide/) ZFS is not part of the current release.

      Justing reading the stuff that is released, however, is a joy.

      --
      Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
    3. Re:Zfs? by superpulpsicle · · Score: 1

      Why are people so anxious to try this? Sun never had a history of getting any x86 OS in good working order. The x86 version of solaris 7, 8, 9 were absolutely horrible.

      If they couldn't do it with a full strength company then, what makes you think they can do opensolaris with half the company laid off?

    4. Re:Zfs? by Zemplar · · Score: 1

      I use Solaris 10 on my dual Opteron and it's MUCH better than Linux and more polished than FreeBSD. Although the userland apps & package management lag most FOSS OSs'. Hopefully OpenSolaris with fix the last part.

      Imagine Debian userland and apt-get on a Solaris kernel!

    5. Re:Zfs? by njcoder · · Score: 1
      Dennis Clarke, who runs blastwave.org, posted an interesting comment on Solaris x86 here. He's been having success with Solaris on x86 since 2.5.1

      It seems that Solaris 2.9 wasn't going to come out for x86 because that was after Sun had bought Cobolt. Then a bunch of happy Solaris x86 users got Sun to change their mind.

      I have had a Solaris 9 x86 server since about the time it came out and it runs just fine.

    6. Re:Zfs? by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 2, Informative

      Hell, I'm running Solaris 10 on an old 433 MHz Pentium 2 and it does just great, Rock-solid and surprisingly fast, given the hardware.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    7. Re:Zfs? by FireDoctor · · Score: 1

      ZFS hasn't been putback yet into the main Solaris ON consolidation (think of it as a private fork by the ZFS development team). When it's putback, it'll be part of OpenSolaris.

    8. Re:Zfs? by htd2 · · Score: 1

      I have been very happy with Solaris 9 x86 running on my Dell Laptop. Very stable and without the vices associated with RedHat Linux like having to recompile the kernel at a drop of a hat and RPM hell.

  7. Nice! by Keystroker · · Score: 0

    This going to be pretty cool. I've always wondered how this thing works. What do you guys plan on doing?

    Everyone is slowly moving to open source. It's interesting how Microsoft will combat this.

    --
    Avarus animus nullo satiatur lucro.
  8. Finally! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Someone does not use init.d for christs sake. I hate it. I hate init.d so much. It's always looking and making symlinks and looking again and probably renumbering and hating it. God, how much I hate it.

    I also had the idea of replacing the whole init.d stuff with a single handcrafted script but all went over me like "You suck!" or "Install DOS, dude!". But those times are over now. I regained my selfesteem and dare say: "init.d sucks so much that I hate it!"

    1. Re:Finally! by Nasarius · · Score: 1

      Check out Gentoo. It uses /etc/init.d, but without the rc levels and numbering and all that crap. It works by having scripts depend on other scripts being started first. The only time you have to symlink is for multiple network devices.

      --
      LOAD "SIG",8,1
    2. Re:Finally! by JonAnderson · · Score: 1

      Or just use smf on Solaris/OpenSolaris

    3. Re:Finally! by AKAImBatman · · Score: 1

      You do realize that *BSD systems don't use init.d, right? They use the much more sensible (albeit less "flexible") rc.d system. The concept is simple:

      This is the master startup script. After it runs, it loads subscripts from this directory. Life is good.

      My own feels have always been that init.d's flexibility comes at far too high of a price in maintainence and ease of use. I'm sure there are others who would disagree, though. (No, I don't want to hear about it.)

    4. Re:Finally! by CapnGrunge · · Score: 2, Informative

      Slackware has no init.d either, you get rc.S for single user, rc.M for multiuser and rc.4 for graphical login.

      --
      I see 57005 people
    5. Re:Finally! by elmegil · · Score: 4, Interesting
      rc.d? I see those on my Solaris system too. Don't you mean "rc.boot" and "rc.local"?? The "init.d" method has a master that runs subscripts from rc*.d directories too, so I fail to see how that's any different.

      SMF is going to be a head check for a lot of people who LIKE init.d/rc.d (though backward compatability with that has been retained so far). Myself, I like the fact that it's more robust and faster, and I don't like the fact that it's managed with a handful of different commands depending on what you want to do. And I'm not terribly thrilled that the backend is XML, but you'll have that.

      --
      7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
    6. Re:Finally! by georgewilliamherbert · · Score: 1
      You do realize that *BSD systems don't use init.d, right? They use the much more sensible (albeit less "flexible") rc.d system. The concept is simple: This is the master startup script. After it runs, it loads subscripts from this directory. Life is good. My own feels have always been that init.d's flexibility comes at far too high of a price in maintainence and ease of use. I'm sure there are others who would disagree, though. (No, I don't want to hear about it.)
      Well, you're going to hear about it.

      How can it be hard to maintain or understand the Solaris init.d/rc.d setup?

      I mean, really. You are going to runlevel 3. The init script goes into /etc/rc3.d, which contains a bunch of K## and S## scripts, many of which are links to a master script in /etc/init.d just so that you don't have to modify five copies of a Sendmail startup script if you play with it.

      It runs all the scripts with K## with "scriptname stop" and all the scripts with S## with "scriptname start".

      You're up.

      Dependencies are implicit in the numbering order for the various scripts, not explicit anywhere, so that's somewhat of a drag. But other than that, what's not to understand?

      Sure, you could put it all in one long shell script for each run level. That works too. Do you code your hundred thousand line C programs in one .c source file too?

    7. Re:Finally! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      FreeBSD and NetBSD now use rcNG, which has separate scripts with explicit dependencies (on abstract services, rather than other concrete instances), allowing parallel launch of the scripts once their dependencies are satisfied.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  9. Parallel boot scripts by ClickWir · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Are there parallel boot scripts made for other distro's? Fedora or Red Hat or Slackware etc....

    1. Re:Parallel boot scripts by Chyeld · · Score: 3, Interesting
      One. Big one comes to mind.

      Don't know about the rest.

    2. Re:Parallel boot scripts by ScrewMaster · · Score: 2, Funny

      Are there parallel boot scripts made for other distro's? Fedora or Red Hat or Slackware etc...

      I don't know.

      --- If you found this answer helpful, click HERE.

      --- If not click HERE.

      --
      The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
    3. Re:Parallel boot scripts by chegosaurus · · Score: 3, Interesting

      They aren't exactly parallel boot scripts. It's a part of something called the Service Management Facility. You write XML manifests describing how services should be started, stopped, restarted, refreshed, and what the SMF should do in the event of failure events. It intruduces the concept of dependencies between services, and makes a lot of things more coherent and logical. It also means you have to learn a lot of new stuff.

      The SMF has a concept of milestones, which groups of scripts "belong" to. This is not unlike the principle of run levels, and when moving between milestones the SMF can fire off a whole bunch of services in parallel. It usually does this through scripts akin to the old init scripts, but doesn't have to.

      That's not a very good description, but it might give someone who can't be bothered to RTFM some idea of one of the big new features.

      Solaris 10 is great. IMHO there's no Unix (or clone) to touch it. That's just my opinion, and I CAN NOT be bothered to argue about it, so don't start!

    4. Re:Parallel boot scripts by njcoder · · Score: 1

      Yeah. I just didn't think I should put all that in the summary :)

    5. Re:Parallel boot scripts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      initng is a syvinit replacement in development.
      http://initng.thinktux.net/

    6. Re:Parallel boot scripts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's just my opinion, and I CAN NOT be bothered to argue about it, so don't start!

      So you will acknowledge, through silent acceptance, my observation that your opinion is completely wrong?

    7. Re:Parallel boot scripts by LnxAddct · · Score: 1

      Fedora Core 4 I believe inits in parallel to speed up booting. If nothing else, there is a good article on IBM's website on how to do it.
      Regards,
      Steve

    8. Re:Parallel boot scripts by Trinn · · Score: 1

      Actually, gentoo happens to have the ability to do this too (basically)..it only has two "milestones" (boot & default) by default, but services can depend on other services, either requiring them to have started before they do, or even requiring to start before they do.

    9. Re:Parallel boot scripts by Cramer · · Score: 1

      IMO, SMF is the single reason why I will not even jokingly advocate the use of Solaris 10. The claim that it does away with init.d scripts is simply a lie... it just puts the shell scripts somewhere else. And the most damning thing about SMF is that f'ing binary settings file that screams "windows registry" (that it duplicates ("archives") at every boot) -- this vs. the now well utilized /etc/defaults directory for application settings (which almost always shows many or all of the available settings and their defaults with descriptions as comments.)

    10. Re:Parallel boot scripts by JonAnderson · · Score: 1

      Erm, you mean legacy services. Maybe you should read about SMF (hell, perhaps even use it) before posting?

    11. Re:Parallel boot scripts by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Free- and NetBSD, as I recall, both use rcNG, which allows init scripts to provide services, and depend on other services. Services can be launched as soon as their dependencies are satisfied.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    12. Re:Parallel boot scripts by cahiha · · Score: 1

      Look at cinit on Freshmeat.

      You will probably not see this in major Linux distributions because it would break most system administration tools and many packages.

  10. I'm unfamiliar by udderly · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Since I'm mostly unfamiliar with Solaris, what are the main advantages it has over Linux, BSD and Windows? Just curious.

    1. Re:I'm unfamiliar by Zemplar · · Score: 1

      Stability, SMP is MUCH better than Linux/BSD, faster, more secure, dTrace, zones & containers, predictive self-healing, compatability, commercial support for Solaris 10, ZFS (soon), project Janus (soon), etc....

      Check it out.

    2. Re:I'm unfamiliar by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 1

      Performance and scalability -- on Sun hardware only, and that scalability edge really is dwindling quickly compared with Linux today. Oh yeah, and a guarantee that you won't be sued by SCO. ;)

    3. Re:I'm unfamiliar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      what are the main advantages it has over Linux, BSD and Windows?

      Well Solaris is +3 vs. undead, while Linux, BSD and Windows are: +1 icy blast, +2 flaming and -4 cursed respectively.

    4. Re:I'm unfamiliar by ahl_at_sun · · Score: 5, Informative

      That answer depends on who you are. If you're a system administrator Predictive Self-Healing is going to raise the reliability of your systems and make management scads easier; SMF makes configuring the system a snap and lets you identify problems quickly and easily; Zones lets you partition the system without the management overhead of a bazillion OS instances; DTrace lets you understand everything that's happening on your system -- and who's responsible for the latest crap-up; Solaris Process Rights improve security and administrative overhead by splitting up the traditional binary notion of the super user. If you're a developer, you'll love DTrace -- I can't imagine developing with out it; the p-tools, truss(1) and mdb(1) are also great. If you're an end-user, well, Solaris's gnome sucks as much as anyone's gnome -- go use Mac OS.

    5. Re:I'm unfamiliar by rubycodez · · Score: 3, Informative

      For Linux and FreeBSD and common packages/ports on opteron and ultrasparc there's still 64 bit cleanliness issues, and there's BSD issues running on Ultrasparc III and above chips (as in, can't do it). FreeBSD is still trying to implement fine grained SMP spinlocks which don't sieze up under heavy load & to get fine grained locks into tcp stack. Solaris builds backward compatibiity into libraries that Linux dosen't have, which is why when installing proprietary app binaries there's all kinds of neat patching and relinking that needs to be done (for example, installing Oracle on Sun is a breeze, but on Linux takes some care as to java and various library versions, and for another example enterprise SAN software such as veritas or Hitachi drivers only works with certain kernels). Solaris has the definitave and latest/greatest versions many services such as RPC and NFS (linux has some issues there)

    6. Re:I'm unfamiliar by bdgregg · · Score: 4, Informative
      Probably the most clear and undenyable feature that is unique to OpenSolaris/Solaris is DTrace.

      DTrace lets us examine just about anything, with minimal impact on the system. It's way cool, and other OSes have nothing that is close (for details covering the Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT), DProbes, K42 and Kerninst see the USENIX paper.

      DTrace solves disk I/O by PID, network activity by PID, elapsed and on-cpu times for syscalls, libcalls and user funcs, and much more.

      DTrace is great if you are a programmer with a little kernel knowledge, but if not you may find the DTraceToolkit helpful - it is a collection of ready-to-roll scripts.

      For a list of many OpenSolaris features with screenshots, see the OpenSolaris Guide.

    7. Re:I'm unfamiliar by JonAnderson · · Score: 1

      Also, with the release of OpenSolaris, Dtrace is now becomes more useful (and it was very, very useful before).

    8. Re:I'm unfamiliar by g0_p · · Score: 1

      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.

    9. Re:I'm unfamiliar by flaming-opus · · Score: 2, Interesting

      you just said mdb = great. Now I know you're just making it up. Mdb is just about useless when the core file is generated on a system other than the one you're debugging with. (always the case if the binary crashes at a customer site, rather than the test-lab) We just went through a lot of effort to convert from using sun CC to compiling with gcc, not because gcc produces better code, but so we could get the right symbols for using gdb.

      mdb is the biggest pain in the world; gdb isn't perfect, but it's a lot simpler than mdb.

    10. Re:I'm unfamiliar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, this is false, and has been since Solaris 10. We felt the same way about the pain of having multiple libraries. With coreadm(1), you have configurable corefile content, including library text segments. By default, all library text is saved with each corefile, so you no longer have to have the original libraries.

      I also fail to see how MDB is any worse than GDB in this regard. GDB must use the same corefiles, and MDB supports the same features for grabbing library data from alternate locations.

      While you may have other reasons for choosing GDB (source level debugging being a main one), for post mortem analysis MDB is miles ahead.

    11. Re:I'm unfamiliar by ahl_at_sun · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yes! That was true, but not as of Solaris 10. The reason core files needed to be on the same machine that produced them was because they didn't include all the necessary information. In particular, they didn't include read-only data. Their genesis was around debugging on a given machine and in that case, dumping the read-only sections is kind of pointless. This was a frustration that affected every application developer who cared about post-mortem analysis; we in Solaris really care about debugging from first failure.

      In Solaris 10, I did some work to make the content of core files adjustable and added text (aka code) to the default. Now when you get a core file, you can debug it on any other system regardless of the patch level, libraries installed or the version of your application that was running. Using coreadm(1M) you can adjust the content to, say, add the symbol table to the core dump or omit the gigantic ISM segment that you don't care about for.

      So, yes, mdb(1) had some limitations in the past -- we've tried to address them in Solaris 10. If you have other issues preventing you from using mdb(1), post a comment on the OpenSolaris site.

      I thought I was going to have to find a shill to ask that question... "Sir, we've never met before, have we?"

    12. Re:I'm unfamiliar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Correction: BSD is -1 Undead.

    13. Re:I'm unfamiliar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, then, now that dtrace is open source. When will we have dtrace support in Linux?

    14. Re:I'm unfamiliar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Predictive Self-Healing, eh?

      How about spelling that out in terms of actual tech for us folk who are quite sick of listening to buzzwords?

      As impressive as it sounds and all...

      DTrace is over-rated. I'm a developer, and I develop just fine without it. Does that make me uncool? I just don't see what the fuss is about.

    15. Re:I'm unfamiliar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      DTrace is just a buzzword for PHB's. Containers are interesting but since we already use para-virtualization and jails they're far from a selling point.

      What does OpenSolaris have that we need or want?

      Nothing

    16. Re:I'm unfamiliar by htd2 · · Score: 1

      Sorry but this isn't supported by any of the admittedly limited tests that have been done comparing Solaris 10x86 with Linux/BSD on the same hardware. BR>
      Solaris always appears to scale better than any of the Linux BSD variants and even more worrying if you are a Linux advocate the Solaris 10 x86 single processor throughput is within a gnats whisker of the best that Linux can do except on TCP dominated workloads where Solaris creams Linux.

  11. Solaris can't compete by jhfry · · Score: 5, Funny

    Solaris doesn't stand a chance against *BSD or Linux... their logo sucks! Come on... seriously... what's more cuter than a Penguin or a Daemon?

    --
    Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
    1. Re:Solaris can't compete by benrockwood · · Score: 1

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

    2. Re:Solaris can't compete by AKAImBatman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Come on... seriously... what's more cuter than a Penguin or a Daemon?

      A Sun with a smiley face?

    3. Re:Solaris can't compete by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fred, http://www.dragonflybsd.org/main/mascot.cgi

      to quote, "the go-lucky demon and the fat penguin are TOAST!"

      Just that want to make me want to join that project.

    4. Re:Solaris can't compete by springbox · · Score: 1

      How about an orange flag?

    5. Re:Solaris can't compete by jhfry · · Score: 1

      I was gonna say just that... but then I thought... nah to obvious! That and who would run an OS that uses a smily sun as it's logo?

      --
      Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
    6. Re:Solaris can't compete by jb.hl.com · · Score: 2, Funny

      Doesn't matter if it's cute...the point is that both Tux and the daemon will both get roasted by the sun :)

      --
      By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
    7. Re:Solaris can't compete by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm considering submitting a catch-phrase for future commercials that they might employ:

      "OpenSolaris. Nothing on Earth can survive without the Sun."

      Too risque, perhaps? My other writing endeavours include "XEmacs: The only editor to include free psychological support," and "Apple: At least we're not Intel (yet)."

    8. Re:Solaris can't compete by markhb · · Score: 1
      who would run an OS that uses a smily sun as it's logo?

      How about these guys??
      --
      Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
    9. Re:Solaris can't compete by moranar · · Score: 1

      But Namco already has the Pac-man trademark.

      --
      "I think it would be a good idea!"
      Gandhi, about Internet Security
    10. Re:Solaris can't compete by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Daemon wins.

    11. Re:Solaris can't compete by Hard_Code · · Score: 1

      Come on, that "SUN" swastika owns you.

      --

      It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
    12. Re:Solaris can't compete by EricTheGreen · · Score: 1

      Nah--the daemon would be OK in an extreme-heat environment.

    13. Re:Solaris can't compete by sconeu · · Score: 1

      Wouldn't that be Evil Otto?

      Chicken! Fight like a robot!

      --
      General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
  12. Do not be so sure by WindBourne · · Score: 1

    Many of Solaris's drivers were either bought from SCO or are ports from BSD. Basically, the best system out there for drivers is Windows followed by Linux.

    --
    I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
    1. Re:Do not be so sure by njcoder · · Score: 1

      SCO was the biggest commercial SysV on x86, BSD drivers will likely be more compatible than Linux drivers. It's at least a start.

    2. Re:Do not be so sure by WindBourne · · Score: 1

      Yeah, it is a start. But it would be interesting to see Sun and Mac work closer with Linux to make a single driver interface that has real meaning. I know, i know. there is one out there. But it suxs so bad that nobody codes to it. Funny thing is, back in the 80's, during the *nix wars, there was an idea to create a VM for coding to, followed by a transcompiler that would take it from the VM to the native arch. Then Sun started working with ATT on sys V 4.0 and one of the conditions that they attached to the work was that ATT kill the VM project. Funny thing is, had Sun allowed it to continue, they would either not be in this position, or would simply have access to a very large set of drivers.

      As it is, they will have to compete against Apple to try and get companies to build drivers for them.

      As I am *nix war vet, I am no longer betting which way it will go.

      --
      I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
    3. Re:Do not be so sure by njcoder · · Score: 1

      Solaris and Apple could probably work on something like this together. I don't see it happening with linux because of the GPL. The way the licenses are it looks like the Solaris and Apple code could go into GPL code, but not the other way around without having to change the CDDL and BSD licenses to GPL. So if this does happen, it would have to be an MPL type license. The linux community could work on it under something like that, or they could just sit back and let Sun and Apple do the work and incorporate it.

    4. Re:Do not be so sure by WindBourne · · Score: 1

      While I am quite certain that the Linux community does not want to be tainted by CDDL code, I think that it is willing to work on tech. that enables the sharing of drivers. If the drivers are released under BSD, then it is a none issue for all. Considering that historically the Linux community does not take code from elsewhere, I doubt that it would take Sun or Apple work unless they did not mind it.

      --
      I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
    5. Re:Do not be so sure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      "While I am quite certain that the Linux community does not want to be tainted by CDDL code,"

      Why would Sun or Apple want to work with people who say shit like that? How does CDDL taint Linux? GPL is the viral license.

      Oh you're going to talk about patents? How about we talk about how IBM published a paper on the web that the PostgreSQL team used to help them in a part of their code. Then they found out IBM had patented it. So they had to scramble to fix it before the release of 8.0. This was recently.

      Why would IBM publish something and not let people know that it was patented? Why patent something after publishing it if you don't plan to sue it offensively? Since you've published it, you've already established prior art. Can't use the excuse that it's defensive.

  13. so.. by brickballs · · Score: 4, Funny
    automatically restarting

    windows automaticay restarts for me all the time. I get a quick flash of blue and then bam! restart.

    --
    "What does slashdotting mean?"
    "You've never heard of slashdot?"
    "I know it makes websites not work."
    1. Re:so.. by PreferredNom · · Score: 0

      brickballs -- Your Slashdot jokebot has a couple of spelling & capitalization bugs. Give us the Sourceforge URL and we'll fix it.

    2. Re:so.. by digidave · · Score: 1

      It's funny because everyone's had it happen to them and he's put it into a funny context. It even happens occasionally on Windows XP. It's also funny because automatically rebooting is the default behaviour since Windows 2000 and I can't count the number of times I've been asked to troubleshoot a friend's or family's system that is mysteriously rebooting by itself.

      --
      The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
  14. Persona non-grata. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    "Teamware is the source code management system Sun uses for Solaris and OpenSolaris. Which was designed by Larry McVoy (now of BitKeeper) while he was at sun. No word yet on if Teamware will be available for OpenSolaris developers or not."

    Remember folks. You hate Larry.

    1. Re:Persona non-grata. by njcoder · · Score: 1
      Why should us folk hate Larry? Linus doesn't hate Larry McVoy

      If you peice the stories together, it seems that Larry let the linux community use a free bitmover client and provided the back end for free. The only stipulation was that they don't try to reverse engineer his product. Someone at OSDL, where Linus was employed at the time started working on reverse engineering BitKeeper. Larry tried to get him to stop but when he didn't he retracted the free version. Somehow the free version was costing BitMover 500,000 a year.

      I don't think it was unreasonable what Larry did. Sounds like an Apple and Eve thing. Maybe there's even a snake to the story.

    2. Re:Persona non-grata. by macshit · · Score: 1

      Er, if you read the lkml during the bitkeeper era, you'll have seen ample reasons to at least dislike Larry. He was constantly making petty threats and basically acted like a spoiled little kid much of the time (as far as I tell, he thought that BK was too important and too hard to replace; it must have been something of a shock when Linus simply rolled up his sleeves and replaced it).

      Linus doesn't hate Larry, because they are (so far as I know) friends -- but Linus is hardly the ultimate arbiter.

      --
      We live, as we dream -- alone....
    3. Re:Persona non-grata. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      "Er, if you read the lkml during the bitkeeper era, you'll have seen ample reasons to at least dislike Larry. He was constantly making petty threats and basically acted like a spoiled little kid much of the time"

      Dude, you read the lkml during any area you'll see people acting like that :)

  15. I don't understand. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What exactly are you trying to say?

    1. Re:I don't understand. by woah · · Score: 1
      That you.. or.. someone sucks?...

      Sorry, I dozed off while reading it.

  16. Happy to know... by ratta · · Score: 0

    that Sun is taking opensource seriously.

    --
    Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
    1. Re:Happy to know... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      but the sun isn't where all the people are!

  17. The real question is does it run on Xen? by WindBourne · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If it runs on Xen, then it can run in parellel with Linux. That would be a good way for code to move one way or another.

    --
    I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
  18. For those of us who don't like torrents by m50d · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp. Requires registration though.

    --
    I am trolling
    1. Re:For those of us who don't like torrents by byolinux · · Score: 1, Funny

      Just curious. Why don't you like torrents?

    2. Re:For those of us who don't like torrents by Nasarius · · Score: 1

      Some of us are behind insanely restrictive firewalls, so the only way to use BitTorrent at all is Tor.

      --
      LOAD "SIG",8,1
    3. Re:For those of us who don't like torrents by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

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

    4. Re:For those of us who don't like torrents by byolinux · · Score: 1

      Oh sure, but that's not a reason to not like BitTorrent, that's just a reason why you can't use it.

      Nice sig btw. I'd prefer RUN "SIG" myself ;)

    5. Re:For those of us who don't like torrents by m50d · · Score: 1

      Too popular, getting too much attention around here, and I need my upstream bandwidth for other things (I'm on ADSL which doesn't help).

      --
      I am trolling
    6. Re:For those of us who don't like torrents by byolinux · · Score: 1

      Too popular? What do you use? Gopher?

    7. Re:For those of us who don't like torrents by mph_az · · Score: 1

      ftp when I can, http when I have to.

    8. Re:For those of us who don't like torrents by m50d · · Score: 1

      No, but I avoid web forums in favour of usenet wherever possible (I make an exception for here). As far as filesharing is concerned I tend to use good old gnutella, works fine, gets little attention, and has a protocol I can understand.

      --
      I am trolling
  19. openoffice... by torrents · · Score: 3, Insightful

    if this project is half as successful for sun as openoffice is i'm sure they'll be happy they decided to open it...

    --
    Get your torrents...
    1. Re:openoffice... by ArsonSmith · · Score: 1

      Only problem, GPL. They knew that if Solaris was released under GPL it'd be dismalteled and incoorperated into Linux due to more free software developers being comfortable with Linux. Sun would lose it's branding ability.

      With OOo it was diffrent. There was nothing to dismatle staroffice into at the time. Sun could maintain the code and not worry about losing control and branding.

      --
      Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
  20. Great. by Telastyn · · Score: 3, Funny

    Perfect. An open source OS backed by a well known name. The perfect stepping stone to get hesitant PHBs to accept an open source OS without a big company behind it into their shops.

    1. Re:Great. by bogie · · Score: 1

      What a strange thing to say. If this was 1999 I could see your point, but give me a break. Red Hat, Novell, and IBM are all well known names by now. Sheesh.

      --
      If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
    2. Re:Great. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      they just converted one of the stations near me to jack fm, i wish i could jack the station...

  21. Free Code is one thing ... by alamut · · Score: 1

    ... free t-shirts? thats another.

    Free T's to the first 1000 swag whores.

    1: get free tshirt
    2: wait 10 years
    3: ebay or equivalent
    4: ???
    5: profit!

    1. Re:Free Code is one thing ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think 4 might be "wait for someone to buy t-shirt"

    2. Re:Free Code is one thing ... by mboos · · Score: 0

      First 1000? It said I was in the first 5000, and because of that, I got a T-shirt.

      Nice guys too. All they asked for was my mailing address - NO EMAIL address required!

      --
      --Mike Boos
    3. Re:Free Code is one thing ... by 0racle · · Score: 1

      It said first 1000 on the side at the front page, but then said first 5000 when I submitted my info, so I don't know. Either way it said I was getting it.

      --
      "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
    4. Re:Free Code is one thing ... by conteXXt · · Score: 1

      Haha That's hilarious (to me)

      I was going through my swag box and found a

      Sun Microsystems "We make the net work" T shirt this morning.

      I didn't even know I had it. (It can with a faded Sun Micro denim jacket and hats so you can see why it was originally overlooked.

      Taking bids (on the tshirt (large)) The denim is MINE.

      --
      The truth about Led Zep should never be told on /. (Karma suicide ensues)
  22. SMF vs InitNG? by yerdaddie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm curious about how the SMF boot parallelization code stacks up against the InitNG project, which does the same for Linux. Anyone had experience with both?

    1. Re:SMF vs InitNG? by codemachine · · Score: 1

      It would also be interesting to see how it compares to Apple's new 'launchd' in OS X. For those who don't know what launchd is, here is an excert from apple's website:

      Launchd provides faster startup through a unified framework for starting, stopping and managing daemons, and incorporates inetd, init, mach_init, System Starter and related services. Administrators have a single mechanism for auditing, configuring and setting resources limits on services.

      Reference: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/unix/

  23. Q: does it run on Xen? A: Not yet but it will by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 4, Informative

    Some Sun guys are doing a port to Xen. This'll give you near-native performance for Solaris apps, along with the comprehensive device support provided by a Linux (or NetBSD) "domain 0" (host virtual machine).

    See http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/tpm/20050510#the_ xen_summit (it seems to be down right now).

    1. Re:Q: does it run on Xen? A: Not yet but it will by taj · · Score: 1

      "See http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/tpm/20050510#the_ xen_summit [sun.com] (it seems to be down right now)."

      Let me guess? Solaris?

  24. No SOC :( by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Too bad they didn't release their SOC/SOC+ drivers :(

  25. Happy day for Jörg Schillig by /ASCII · · Score: 1

    Jörg Schilling will be so happy. He can finally release SchilliX, the Linux lookalike that runs cdrecord the way god intended it to.

    --
    Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
  26. Apps Here! Get Your Apps Here! by Zemplar · · Score: 4, Informative

    Ckeck out Blastwave.org http://www.blastwave.org/ for some torrents, apps, guides, and other goodies.

    Additionally, SunFreeware http://www.sunfreeware.com/ is another great site for getting applications.

  27. In another news today by guardiangod · · Score: 2, Funny

    Spokeman from SCO annonced today that they are currently closely examining Solaris source code for any "infringing" SCO's Linux code.

    When asked about the legitmacy of the action, however- "This IS the property of SCO, that's final...no we don't have proof for that, but we are working on that."

  28. maybe PJ can stop with the Sun conspiracy theories by willdenniss · · Score: 2, Funny

    I agree. I think this is pretty good proof of Sun's good intentions. Hopefully Groklaw's PJ can stop with the Sun conspiracy theories now.

    Will.

  29. Can either an "Editor" or the Poster please RTFA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "7 second boot on a dual opteron workstation I think that was the setup"

    You don't have to think, just RTFA, where you can see that it was a single AMD64 setup.
    Still, I guess that would be too much trouble for the simple gain of being correct ?

  30. Is the monopoly finally being smashed? by CyricZ · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I believe we are seeing the monopoly finally begin smashed to pieces. Besides the Linux and *BSD alternatives, we now have open-source x86 Solaris at our disposal, as well as the upcoming release of yellowTAB Zeta (based on BeOS). And with Mac OS X coming to the x86, things may really start to get interested. Just as people thought the x86 PC operating system market would start to stagnate, we have all sorts of innovation coming our way!

    --
    Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
    1. Re:Is the monopoly finally being smashed? by snoofy · · Score: 1

      solaris ... NOT solaris x86! remember one source many platforms ...

    2. Re:Is the monopoly finally being smashed? by CyricZ · · Score: 1

      I'm talking about Solaris running on x86-based PC desktops. Desktops (formerly?) encumbered by Microsoft's Windows monopoly. I'm not talking about Sun SPARC workstations that Windows never ran on.

      --
      Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
    3. Re:Is the monopoly finally being smashed? by cranos · · Score: 1

      Open Solaris is not going to do anything to "Smash the Monopoly". Most normal people think solaris is either a book or movie not an OS.

      Apple on Intel might have an effect, however if Apple continues its policy of hardware lockin (yes even under Intel architecture) its impact is not going to be as great as they would like.

    4. Re:Is the monopoly finally being smashed? by CyricZ · · Score: 1

      I agree. But that's only because Sun has only recently been pushing Solaris for wider use. Go back to 1982 and most people will think that "Windows" are the things in their house that they look out of, and open for a breath of fresh air.

      --
      Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
  31. Re:WHY NOW? I'LL TELL YOU WHY! by pedantic+bore · · Score: 1
    Sun has been working on OpenSolaris for a long time. This is not a reaction to Apple.

    You could make a more convincing case that Apple is going to x86 to counter OpenSolaris (since OpenSolaris came first). Note that I said more convincing, not convincing. Give the wacky Sun theories a day off, please.

    --
    Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
  32. 7 second boot on an Opteron??! by namekuseijin · · Score: 1

    my Duron 850 boots Fedora 1 in about 30 seconds. Granted, it doesn't boot database, web or other servers at startup and doesn't have a bloated JVM installed as well, but still...

    It's a friggin Opteron and the substitute for init.d scripts should work faster than that!

    --
    I don't feel like it...
    1. Re:7 second boot on an Opteron??! by Nasarius · · Score: 1

      Bear in mind, hard drive I/O is quite a bottleneck.

      --
      LOAD "SIG",8,1
    2. Re:7 second boot on an Opteron??! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No thats the thing, it takes my AMD 2500 about a minute to boot with init.d. It doesn't matter if only 5% of your processor is being used at a time, it still wont go any faster. This is the main reason why people needed a new architecture is because init.d doesnt allow them to instal faster.

  33. It is MS and Sun vs. Linux by WindBourne · · Score: 3, Insightful

    MS moved to "Shared Source" sometime ago. It was done in hopes that Linux coders would borrow from MS. So far, it has not happened.

    But this has potential to do what MS could not. Solaris is at least respected by the development world. This is simply another trap being laid by Sun and MS against Linux.

    What is funny is how little ppl seem to remember from just 7 years ago. Sun actually ported to X86 once before AND "opened" their source code. Then when they thought that things were going well, they dropped it. If Sun ever feels like things are going in their favor, it is almost certain that they will do it again.

    --
    I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
    1. Re:It is MS and Sun vs. Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's released. The license prevents Sun from ever taking it back.

      Sun did not make Solaris open source before, however the source code was previously licensed to universities and corporations though.

      You're referring to how Sun once stopped supporting x86 many years ago. After customers got together and demanded Sun support x86 again, they did, and now they're doing it in full force.

    2. Re:It is MS and Sun vs. Linux by njcoder · · Score: 2, Informative
      "But this has potential to do what MS could not. Solaris is at least respected by the development world. This is simply another trap being laid by Sun and MS against Linux."

      Try reading the CDDL FAQ before you start trolling.

      Can code licensed under the CDDL be combined with code licensed under other open source licenses?

      CDDL is file-based; that means that files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under other licenses, whether open source or proprietary. However, other licenses may have different restrictions which may prevent such combination; be sure to read and recognize those.

      So how can they "trap" people when the code is released under and OSI approved license?

      "What is funny is how little ppl seem to remember from just 7 years ago. Sun actually ported to X86 once before AND "opened" their source code. Then when they thought that things were going well, they dropped it. If Sun ever feels like things are going in their favor, it is almost certain that they will do it again."

      Sun has had an x86 port for a long long time. They dropped it around the time they bought Cobalt. Probably because Cobalt and Solaris x86 competed for some of the same market. The Solaris x86 community rallied together and got Sun to bring it back. I'm sure that the appliance market wasn't panning out helped too. But now Sun is really pushing forward with Opterons. Some details were leaked on the new Galaxy line of Opterons coming out. Should be good stuff. And as for dropping it, well it's open source now. It's going to be out there for ever.

    3. Re:It is MS and Sun vs. Linux by starfishsystems · · Score: 3, Interesting
      This is simply another trap being laid by Sun and MS against Linux.

      It may be. I know a very bright Microsoft zealot who thinks it is, and couldn't be more delighted at the prospect.

      I don't think it is, myself. For one thing, the internal cultures of these two organizations, and the personalities they attract to senior positions, could not be more different. You just have to look at their past conduct to see this. Microsoft does lay traps, systematically, all the time. Sun is a corporate player too, thus in the game for profit, but its strategies are much more symbiotic in their essential character.

      When Sun puts someone on a standards committee, it's to make the standard more valuable for everyone, on the express theory that it's better to share a growing market than have all of a stagnant one. When Microsoft puts someone on the same committee, it's to "embrace and extend" the standard so as to exclude competition, and the expressed goal is to eliminate all competition.

      Another thing worth remembering is that an organization as big as Sun has substantial internal struggles from time to time. Such was the case with Solaris on X86. The project took off energetically at first, but it was a risky venture which happened to fall out of political favor just at the point when driver support was becoming most critical. The result was not a strategic withdrawl, it was a conspicuous fumble which cost Sun a lot of internal morale, hurt its reputation, and lost it a golden opportunity whose extent has only become more apparent in recent years.

      So yes, it could all happen again, but not because of some nefarious strategy on the part of Sun Microsystems. Sun does not have a history of executing that way.

      --
      Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
    4. Re:It is MS and Sun vs. Linux by nycbicyclist · · Score: 1

      This may be a stupid question (I'm not familiar with software licenses), but what is meant by a "file-based" license? Does that mean that a developer can incorporate CDDL code into his software, but only if he incorporates it in file-sized chunks? Or can he use snippets of code and put them into his files?

    5. Re:It is MS and Sun vs. Linux by justins · · Score: 4, Interesting
      What is funny is how little ppl seem to remember from just 7 years ago. Sun actually ported to X86 once before AND "opened" their source code. Then when they thought that things were going well, they dropped it. If Sun ever feels like things are going in their favor, it is almost certain that they will do it again.

      I won't be the only one, but I just thought I'd point out that the license they are using this time around is quite different, and they literally cannot take away your right to use the code once you've got it. You might read the (OSI-approved) license before spouting off, although I know that is asking a lot.

      http://www.opensolaris.org/os/licensing/
      --
      Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
    6. Re:It is MS and Sun vs. Linux by qaxzar · · Score: 1

      as per ur last paragraph. look at the license FAQ:

      last question:

      Can Sun ever take away the OpenSolaris source code?

      No. The code is available to the community forever.

    7. Re:It is MS and Sun vs. Linux by nodrogluap · · Score: 1

      I have met Sun kernel developers, and they run Solaris x86 as their desktops. So yeah, they've definitely been supporting it the whole time, whether the head honchos felt that way or not...

    8. Re:It is MS and Sun vs. Linux by WindBourne · · Score: 2, Interesting

      They are not as different as you think. I have worked at IBM and HP and have seen first-hand how Sun does things. Most of the traps that they have laid in the past have been in sales for other companies (IBM/HP being just 2 of many ).

      As it is, McNeally's collaboration with MS makes me very edgy. Consider how much McNeally hates Gates and MS. It does not make sense for them to work together.

      I have some friends who work for Sun and some others that work for MS (one who is on the linux tiger team - when he could talk that was interesting info ). One of my poker buddies is one of Sun's kernel guy. When I listen to him, then Sun is above board and simply competing. But every time we get into a discussion about Sun vs. the industry, he has been 100% wrong. Every time. Best example was the Solaris x86 release. Once Sun thought they were doing great, then they cut the project. But of course, a developer is not privy to sales and management choices.

      One of the MS guys claims that this is a long term trap. In particular, both MS's and Sun's license allows the use of the patents in the files (not code) for the system use. If anybody "borrows" the code, then they are no longer protected. Both companies are supposedly hopeful that the Linux world will pick up from either (interestingly, MS no longer thinks that it will come from their stuff, so Shared source will probably die or be severely limited). I no longer code on Solaris just due to my not trusting Sun's motives. Sad, because like any Unix, I like it.

      --
      I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
    9. Re:It is MS and Sun vs. Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      I'm always surprised this type that these types of comments get rated so high on slashdot.

      First of all, IBM and HP are two of Sun's biggest competitors. It's not surprising to hear them talk down sun. Sun was started by a couple of true geeks, an mba and a guy with a lot of money and vision. They were always very technology focused and anti microsoft. They worked with open technologies before someone decided to put a capitalize O and S in open source. IBM has a shady reputation, not a lot has changed. IBM will say anything to get their products in the door. I've seen it first hand. This is one of my favorite IBM /Sun stories from a while back.

      The Sun/MS thing is a recent occurence. Before that, Sun was doing it's own thing competing against Microsoft. IBM and HP were MS partners the whole time. Who do you think has benefitted more from their relationship with MS, Sun or IBM and HP?

      The reason this whole MS/Sun deal came about was because MS was abusing Sun's license on Java. Sun always seemed to be about open standards and level technological playing fields. Their chips are open, they built their OS on open source, they released a lot of open source and published a lot of information to allow compatability and competition. Look at what they're doing with Java. They're trying to keep the process open to all with the JCP so that one vender can't wrestle control. If Sun was as underhanded as you think, they'd at least be the number one or number two java server vendor. They're not. IBM's been trying to get more control over Java for years, not as bad as MS though, but it is a situation that needs to be watched. IBM has recently been championing linux but other than that, how have they supported openness in the past? Have a look at the Compuware suite which was settled for $400 million a couple of months ago.

      MS tried to screw that over and take control of the Java market. Sun stood up against MS. Hell, they stood up for all developers that MS has tried to screw. Most of the times MS succeeds. Sun and Oracle really pushed for the anti trust cases here and in Europe. They put a lot of effort into the fight. It really was "Mankind vs Microsoft", not Sun vs Microsoft. MS had screwed over a lot of smaller software companies and now they were getting together to put an end to it, with Sun leading the pack. Oracle was a big player too but none of them were as anti-microsoft as Sun. So after a long, world-wide legal battle, MS loses and gets declared a monopoly. Woohoo! Ok, hold your horses because a new team just came into the Justice Dept and things don't look as rosey as they did before. On top of that IBM and HP have been nipping away at Sun's market share with their own Unix lines as well as using Linux. Now the open source community is starting to boo and hiss at Sun too. The main reason was because Sun liked Solaris better than Linux. Some of Sun's managers might have been a bit colorful but in interviews with developers, including Bill Joy you heard good things about Linux. Sun really didn't say anything about linux that was different from what IBM said about Linux vs AIX back then. What else did they say? Oh yeah, they'd indemnify their customers that use Linux. How is that bad and OSRM not?

      With the justice dept dropping the ball, the community that should have been more supportive of Sun being against them and MS having made inroads into Sun's server turf Sun decides to settle. The settlement includes a big fee for infringment as well as an agreement to interoperate better. Sun's customers have been wanting this for a long time. They use Sun and they use Windows. They want them to work together. Not only that, but MS now has to be more cooperative in general. MS has also taken the initiative to end other lawsuits

    10. Re:It is MS and Sun vs. Linux by eviltypeguy · · Score: 1

      As it is, McNeally's collaboration with MS makes me very edgy. Consider how much McNeally hates Gates and MS. It does not make sense for them to work together.

      It makes perfect sense from a customer perspective. If you had watched the webcast video that was posted on SUN's website, you would have realised that one of the primary reasons for their cooperation is their customers. Their customers want a single-sign-on system that works regardless of platform. Microsoft and SUN are both committed to that. For a business it always comes down to customers, if they can't keep them happy enough to make money, then there is no point to their existence.

    11. Re:It is MS and Sun vs. Linux by eviltypeguy · · Score: 1

      I am not a lawyer, however, from what I understand this is basically what you need to know:

      1) File-based meaning linking against code produced from CDDL files does not automatically place your code under the same license.

      2) Any code you derive from CDDL licensed code becomes CDDL licensed. (This is the nature of any copyleft license that I know of). This means that whatever code file you integrate CDDL code into should also be licensed under the CDDL.

      3) If you know what the MPL (Mozilla Public License) is, the CDDL basically works the same way.

    12. Re:It is MS and Sun vs. Linux by eviltypeguy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      One of the MS guys claims that this is a long term trap. In particular, both MS's and Sun's license allows the use of the patents in the files (not code) for the system use. If anybody "borrows" the code, then they are no longer protected. Both companies are supposedly hopeful that the Linux world will pick up from either (interestingly, MS no longer thinks that it will come from their stuff, so Shared source will probably die or be severely limited). I no longer code on Solaris just due to my not trusting Sun's motives. Sad, because like any Unix, I like it.

      Also incorrect. If someone "borrows" the code, as long as they comply with the terms of the CDDDL, they have the right to any patents that were granted by that license. Which in this case are any patents that SUN owns.

    13. Re:It is MS and Sun vs. Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is simply another trap being laid by Sun and MS against Linux.

      How stupid are /. people that this gets a mod 5? People not EVERYTHING is a conspiracy around Linux.

      Linux, the religion that gives /. people a purpose. Though what the purpose is I do not know....

    14. Re:It is MS and Sun vs. Linux by Waldmeister · · Score: 1

      MS moved to "Shared Source" sometime ago. It was done in hopes that Linux coders would borrow from MS. So far, it has not happened.

      IIRC Microsoft released two or three packages under their Shared Source license, stuff like a new Windows installer based on XML files.

      But this has potential to do what MS could not. Solaris is at least respected by the development world. This is simply another trap being laid by Sun and MS against Linux.

      Solaris is just another operating system, released under an OSS license. Is *BSD a trap, being laid out by the DoD, just because the DARPA sponsored some parts of the development? It's really surprising, how paranoid people can get...

      What is funny is how little ppl seem to remember from just 7 years ago. Sun actually ported to X86 once before AND "opened" their source code. Then when they thought that things were going well, they dropped it. If Sun ever feels like things are going in their favor, it is almost certain that they will do it again.

      Bullshit. Sun delayed Solaris 9 x86, when they were already facing financial problems, not during the dotcom aera. And they finally noticed, that Solaris x86 could be much more than a nice-to-have for system administrators and the like.

      Right now, they earn more money with x86 systems and Solaris x86 than ever before. And even if they deceide to drop Solaris x86, there's still OpenSolaris.

    15. Re:It is MS and Sun vs. Linux by TheDracle · · Score: 1

      OpenSolaris is so completely different than Windows. This is completely not a trap. The big difference is, this is OPEN. The GPL, and GNU, isn't just about Linux, it is all about open source. Windows competes by being more closed, and convincing vendors to be closed as well. This is great, because it shows that the main incentive of capitalism, competition, can co-exist with open-source as well. Instead companies are competing to be more open. Sun has taken a step towards being more open, and this demonstrates just how enormously successful Linux and the open source movement has become.

      Just like BSD "competes" with Linux, and everyone benefits, so will people benefit from these ideas. There really shouldn't be any blind allegiance to Linux, that is irrational, Linux is simply a result of the open source movement. The advantage of having open source ideas is that advancement isn't impeded by these irrational financial motives. If solaris is the better option, if all of the ideas contained within it are open, then I see no rational reason not to use Solaris, or BSD, or whatever open operating systems or software that will exist in the near and distant future.

      Cross your fingers and wait for OpenJava people... I predict it may not be far behind.

  34. very good thing by micromuncher · · Score: 1

    This is a very good thing.

    Some of us have been waiting for true POSIX compliance for some time (woohoo shared memory mapped files!)

    Though Sun gave pretty sweet deals for Solaris (think I got intel for $100), opening it up means a lot more people can be programming for it, specifically where it was weak (drivers).

    --
    /\/\icro/\/\uncher
  35. Dear CmdrTaco, by Tonik,+the · · Score: 0

    Possessive its has no apostrophe, you, erm, damned person with an intellectual impairment. How many visitors a day again and you idiots still can't hire an editor? (c) tehdely & tezbobobo

  36. Kevin Metnick by cdn-programmer · · Score: 1

    I quote:

    "Sun Microsystems claimed that you caused $80m of damage by illegally downloading the source code for Solaris.

    It's a bullshit figure. What was really unnerving was that to demonstrate to the public and the courts that I was such a bad guy, the only things they could show were financial damages.

    What I was essentially doing is stealing source code to analyse it for vulnerabilities. I was moving it because I wanted to be on my target's computers for as little time as possible.

    So what the government did was come up with these huge numbers; they basically told the companies to provide the loss as the R&D investment to develop the software. So if I look at Solaris source code, which was sold to educational institutions for a few grand, I merely copied it over to the computers at USC - which already had a copy of it, incidentally.

    -------------

    See - look at the lies and bullshit and now a few years later SUN open-sources the code!!! If the sun sets on sun it will be ok. I do not invest in sun and I do not use or support any sun products.

    -------------

    What a crock!

    This comes from here:

    http://www.computingcareers.co.uk/vnunet/features/ 2130030/kevin-mitnick-art-intrusion-part

    1. Re:Kevin Metnick by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's also another about face from the early nineties when Sun changed from giving away it's C compiler with the OS to charging for it. This gave the GNU folks a big boost at the time. Sun ended up spuring open source development forward through a stupid attempt at profiteering. Sun, can you seriously shake the devil's hand and expect us to believe you were kidding?

    2. Re:Kevin Metnick by elmegil · · Score: 1
      So basically he's saying any open source OS is not worth shit? Bet that will go down really well with RMS and company.

      Just because Sun decided to make $80m worth of software OSS doesn't mean it has no value. And breaking and entering to get/test software doesn't really speak well for one's "good intentions". Now that it's OSS, feel free to get and analyze it any way you like. Doesn't change the fact that it was breaking and entering to get it back in the day.

      --
      7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
  37. Has Sun "got-it" this time around? by Lead+Butthead · · Score: 1

    It seems to me that every now and then (in recent years) Sun will come out supporting Open Source movement and then short time later put its foot in its mouth by coming out swinging *AT* Open Source movement. It leaves me wondering if burried somewhere in the legalese of their license agreement is some nasty clause that will just screw Open Source movement over at a later time.

    --
    ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
    1. Re:Has Sun "got-it" this time around? by Zemplar · · Score: 1

      erm, perhaps like OpenOffice/StarOffice?

      ...'nuff said.

    2. Re:Has Sun "got-it" this time around? by ehaggis · · Score: 1

      Can anyone give me a brief description of pluses and minuses of the CDDL?

      --
      One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
    3. Re:Has Sun "got-it" this time around? by htd2 · · Score: 1

      Your point question/point neatly illustrates how far the perception of Sun's support for OpenSource differs from the reality.

      Sun is the single largest commercial donator to the OpenSource community and the second largest donator behind FSF. Huge chunks of this have not been headline grabbing stuff but instead relate to the mundane but impossible to do without basic plumbing for OS's. XFN, PAM etc etc.

      However there has also been some headline grabbing stuff as well
      OpenOffice
      NetBeans
      Grid
      Big chunks of Gnome
      etc etc

  38. Sun Compiler License by Noksagt · · Score: 2, Interesting

    When will the Sun compiler be released under the CDDL? Currently, Sun Studio is under a different license.

    1. Re:Sun Compiler License by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When will the Sun compiler be released under the CDDL? Currently, Sun Studio is under a different license.

      It doesn't sound like it's going to. Remember, they still want to make money off it, they're just giving it to you if you want to build OpenSolaris.

  39. Polaris by Mistah+Blue · · Score: 1

    Way cool. When my PPC PB 15" is ready to be replaced with a new Intel one, I can repurpose it with a Polaris load. Very nice.

    1. Re:Polaris by Amiga+Trombone · · Score: 1

      That's assuming it gets ported to Apple hardware. The only thing I saw on their web site was the statement that the Pegasos would be the standard reference platform. Which is probably a logical choice, given that at the moment, it's the only affordable commodity PPC platform with a future.

      I wish there was a little more information regarding the project on their web site. I'm interested in following this project myself.

  40. Fair is fair... by WhyCantIBeYou · · Score: 1

    Time to steal the good features and port them to Linux :) IMHO, Slowaris is relatively polished, but some things are clunky and slow.

    1. Re:Fair is fair... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ... or maybe it's time you read the license...

    2. Re:Fair is fair... by oldmanmtn · · Score: 1
      You mean like the slab allocator?


      Oh, wait...they did that years ago.

      --
      - Old Man of the Mountain ---- "I want to disturb my neighbor"
    3. Re:Fair is fair... by WhyCantIBeYou · · Score: 1

      It was merely a joke.

  41. Solaris advantages by ms139us · · Score: 1

    I have run a Solaris system since the 2.3 days.

    If you are deploying a system that will be around for several years, Sparc Solaris lets you upgrade hardware and software with minimal hassles and downtime.

    Try bringing a 1998 Linux install in a 24x7 environment and upgrading the disks, CPU, memory, mobo, networking, the OS, apps and libraries without breaking everything that has been tacked on to the system in the past 7 years. This is done all the time with Solaris.

    If the lifespan of your app/server is only 18 months, then none of this matters.

  42. NEAT!!! by CoolVibe · · Score: 1

    Wow, I've been waiting for this one. And I was also one of the first 5000 on the website, so I scored myself a nifty free opensolaris tee as well :)

    Go Sun! :)

    1. Re:NEAT!!! by njcoder · · Score: 1

      :( damn. I was too busy writting this long ass summary and poking around on the cvs site to notice the free tshirts. Bored today I guess and I knew the enws was coming. I noticed that the cvs site was up before the main site came up but you couldn't get to it unless you you went to http://cvs.opensolaris.org./ Tried to get SmartCVS to connect earlier this morning to see what would happen. So much for breaking news before it's broken... (Especially considering last night there were articles online saying Sun already released OpenSolaris).

  43. Re:WHY NOW? I'LL TELL YOU WHY! by Stonent1 · · Score: 1

    The launch date of OpenSolaris was set in stone more than a month ago. Pilot members knew it was going to be today.

  44. Gentoo by flithm · · Score: 1

    I don't know if it compares to SMF (probably not), but Gentoo's init system is quite good. It supports parallel service launching, does automatic dependency checking (so if you restart one service that others depend on it restarts them all).

    It also doesn't require you to add and remove symlinks in a bunch of rc.d directories which is really nice. If you want to add or remove a service there's a simple one command utility that does it for you.

  45. History repeats itself... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    Remember, In the 2.5.1 days there *was* a port of Solaris that ran on PPC. It ran on the Motorola Powerstack among other hardware. Internally to Sun at one point there was a project to have Sparc 20s run with a PowerPC-based Mbus processor.

    I've always pondered about porting Solaris to DEC Alpha, but I believe the prime time for that has long since passed.

  46. Re:WHY NOW? I'LL TELL YOU WHY! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yea, because everyone knows Solaris and OS X have a huge amount of competition between them...

  47. Using it right now ! by krelian · · Score: 1

    It's suberb ! Everything works jus

  48. Polaris by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Don't they know that 'Polaris' is a registered trademark?

    Polaris® is a registered trademark of GIS Information Systems, Inc., dba Polaris Library Systems

  49. Use the source... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So has anyone actually looked at the code? Is it any good? Any Linux guys care to comment?

    1. Re:Use the source... by oldmanmtn · · Score: 1

      If they're smart, the Linux guys won't be looking at it - just like the Solaris engineers shouldn't be looking at Linux. And the FreeBSD guys shouldn't be looking at anything.

      With all the different licenses floating around, there is too much risk of getting polluted and accidentally mixing IP.

      --
      - Old Man of the Mountain ---- "I want to disturb my neighbor"
  50. what has the world come to... by xtinct · · Score: 1

    when people would rather give out their mailing address than their email address????! ;)

    1. Re:what has the world come to... by mboos · · Score: 0

      I'm a co-op student. In less than three months, I will have moved out of this smog-hole of a city and be back at university, never to return to that particular address again. My email, hopefully, will persist.

      --
      --Mike Boos
  51. search for sco by maxbic · · Score: 1

    Do a full text search for sco on the source browser: http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/

  52. When it can be run fully from sun4cdm machines... by sethstorm · · Score: 1

    ...OpenSolaris will be done. Until then, I assume Sun will play its usual EOL games with hardware (ZX off in 1-2 versions (crippled when officially supported, hackable onto Solaris 7), and the drop of 32bit hardware in Solaris 10 for example?). Evidence of them doing this again is in the code - note that a search for leo brings up it being in a filter of "Obsolete hardware".

    --
    Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
  53. OT: Gandhi by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    First they march you hundreds of miles through the jungle,
    then they shoot you,
    then they disembowel you,
    then you lose.

    -- Gandhi, had the Japs won WW2

  54. Yeah But, How Long Will This Last? by mpapet · · Score: 1

    From a technical perspective this is a good thing.

    But:
    - How does this ensure Sun's going-forward viability? e.g. will Sun be around in 10 years to support this? Based on their stock's selling price, I'd say the investment community is betting against Sun being around as Sun.
    - How exactly does this make PHB's feel better? I'm all for OSS especially with the credibility of a Sun behind it, but PHB's want support.

    Mod me down, but I think they are good questions.

    --
    http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
    1. Re:Yeah But, How Long Will This Last? by njcoder · · Score: 1
      You also have to keep in mind that just because there's OpenSolaris there's still Solaris 10 which is available for free or with optional paid support. What OpenSolaris does is help build the solaris community. Most likely it will be current Sun customers and ISV's just like the pilot seems to indicate. You'll also start to have more users and hobbyists trickling in. My guess is they're banking on OpenSolaris and free Solaris 10 to increase deployments and get more people using those products. Just like their JES and JDS pricing lowers the barrier of entry.

      Once you get more people using your products you increase brand awareness and this will drive more sales of support contracts, hardware and consulting services.

      Sun has some interesting tech in the works in addition to Solaris and some of their recent technology purchases should strengthen their position as a full service technology firm a la IBM. The only thing their lacking is a DB but there are rumors that one might be coming. Sun has been pretty good with partnering with other companies to offer 'best of breed' (hate that term) packages in conjunction with home grown designs. Hopefully they keep that up so they don't get locked in to the wrong product.

      I think their stock price is a result of a few things, all circling around the dot com bubble. Durring the bubble sun was making money like there was no tomorrow. They grew their business very fast and were very slow to cut the excess fat when the bubble burst. They also made a couple of mistakes by not concentrating on lower end servers and x86 earlier on. Sun's stock price is trading at just over 1x revenues. During the boom it was trading at around 10x revenues. After the drop Scott McNealy pretty much told investors what where you thinking inflating the price so much, at that level he'd have to run the business with no overhead (salaries, property, taxes, r&d, etc) for 10 years to be able to have the type of return they would need to recoup their investment. I'm sure some people might have been put off a bit by hearing it was their own fault after losing millions of dollars. Sun doesn't control their stock price, it's the demand from investors that drove it up. During that same time where people were racing to buy SUNW and driving the stock up Sun itself was acting as if it was a 200 billion dollar company. Both sides screwed up. Sun realized and admitted their mistake and started resizing the company and correcting for some bad choices. Sun lost a good deal of money but they weren't out of the picture, unlike other dot com high fliers they were still around as a reminder to the people that lost so much money on SUNW. That last split at the end of 2000 was probably a mistake. They were already heading down pretty fast. If they didn't have that split they'd be trading somewhere around the 7 dollar range today. When you drop bellow 5 you're in trouble because certain types of institutional investors have provisions in their plans to not hold on to stocks that are below 5 bucks. And if I remember correctly when Sun dropped bellow 5 there was a lot of selling going on. If you look at the whole stock history it doesn't look so bad if you bretend that bump around the late 90's didn't exist.

      At least that's my opinion on the matter.

      Sun's put a lot of money into R&D and is really opening up in ways to turn their customers into a community. Not just with OpenSolaris and all their other open source projects but with their blogs too. Hopefully people realize all their doing and Sun doesn't make any major misteps, especially since so many people are critical of them. HP is pretty much out of the RISC business except for what looks like an extended support period and their Unix lines are going to go away with that. Fujitsu's not a big player in the US compared to the other guys. That leaves IBM, WinTel and RedHat (maybe SuSE). Apple might grab a bigger part of the profitability in that market seems to be dropping. Probably why IBM sold off thei

  55. Re:WHY NOW? I'LL TELL YOU WHY! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Good point. Why would anyone want to run Solaris on x86 when you can run FreeBSD, Linux, OS-X or Windows? Solaris just does not offer anything sexy. This is just a desperate attempt to lure developers to develop x86 Solaris software. I think it'll fail.

  56. Parallel boot scripts are *soo* hard by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just use the "&" character to fire off a second script in the background. Geez.

    Remember, though, that when more than one boot script is writing "Starting XYZZY" to the console, it's going to be all mashed together and look like crap.

  57. What about the valuable SCO IP? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There must be at least as much valuable SCO intellectual property in this as there was in the stuff IBM donated to Linux.

    Darl, you better be checking this out! Millions and millions of lines! Billions and billions of dollars!

    1. Re:What about the valuable SCO IP? by Ravnen · · Score: 1

      SCO have already said they have no problem with Sun releasing OpenSolaris. Some have speculated that this is because Sun's agreement with USL gave it enough rights to the Unix code (much of which came from Sun to USL) to make it open anyway, whether or not SCO like it.

  58. Re:When it can be run fully from sun4cdm machines. by Nerant · · Score: 1

    What drop of 32bit hardware in Solaris 10 are you referring to?

    Solaris 10 runs on Sparc (which has been 64 bit for quite long), x86 and AMD64/EM64T.

    --
    Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
  59. OO.o, Competitors, and the GPL by Noksagt · · Score: 1

    OO.o was released in July 2000. KOffice was started in 1998.

    As a point of clarification, OO.o is under the LGPL and the SISSL. Obviously LGPL is GPL-compatible, but SISSL isn't (though it is still free).

    This is in contrast to the CDDL of OpenSolaris, which is also GPL-incompatible.

    1. Re:OO.o, Competitors, and the GPL by PFAK · · Score: 1

      What's wrong with not releasing it under the GPL? I still think the GPL is "ugly nasty beasty".

      I think OpenSolaris will do much better with the corporate world then Linux, because of the CDDL. Corporations are scared of developing for GPL because of it's license.

      --

      Free means no restrictions, ironic the FSF's GPL forces restrictions, isn't it? What's your definition of free?
    2. Re:OO.o, Competitors, and the GPL by Noksagt · · Score: 1
      What's wrong with not releasing it under the GPL?
      Your beef is with the great-grandparent of this post. I didn't agree/disagree that the GPL was what made OO.o successful. I merely debated the point that Sun had nothing to fear by putting OO.o under a GPL-compatible license.

      However, I can play devil's advocate & say that the GPL has proven developer-buy-in and user-buy-in. Yes, some may not like copyleft licenses. But the truth is that corporations have already chosen GPLed-Linux over non-copyleft *BSD licenses.

      I have no problems with the CDDL, but I doubt corps will switch from Linux to OpenSolaris. Most who would run Solaris already are running the commercial version.
  60. Please learn to spell "its", for heaven's sake... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Spelling matters.

  61. SMF =~ daemontools by nberryguy · · Score: 1

    SMF actually replaces all of inetd and *some* scripts found in /etc/init.d

    1. Re:SMF =~ daemontools by phocutus · · Score: 0

      Actually, you "can" use it with ANY Daemon, you have to write the SMF youself and import it.

      I've used it with PostgreSQL, Postfix, Apache (1&2), Sendmail, Syslog etc you name it it's been done.

      Learn to 'use the docs' and you'll know the force.

  62. Have you even looked at the CDDL? by wyoung76 · · Score: 1
    Essentially, it's based off of the MPL.

    This should give you something useful to learn from: http://www.sun.com/cddl/CDDL_why_details.html

  63. Re:WHY NOW? I'LL TELL YOU WHY! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just curious - who are these so called 'pilot members'? I know a guy who works at Sun and he had no clue about this. You're talking BS aren't you?

  64. so true by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I love searching through source code. Check out line 154 of this code:

    http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/usr/src/cmd /perl/5.8.4/distrib/lib/Benchmark.t#154

    1. Re:so true by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's just perl...

  65. Re:First they ignore you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Stop posting the same thing over and over again please.

  66. Re:Can either an "Editor" or the Poster please RTF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And that's the booting of a zone as well, not the whole machine. Big difference.

    Ever see how fast a Xen domain boots? Pretty quick as well.

  67. That's a rather silly statement. by sczimme · · Score: 1


    When it can be run fully from sun4cdm machines... ...OpenSolaris will be done.

    Sure, if you can get Solaris 10 to run on a 4c machine like an IPC, with its blistering 25MHz CPU and SCSI-1 bus and maximum of 64MB (IIRC) RAM, you go ahead and do that. I'll be over here doing something fun, like compiling Gentoo while watching paint dry and hitting myself in the head with a hammer.

    Until then, I assume Sun will play its usual EOL games with hardware (ZX off in 1-2 versions (crippled when officially supported, hackable onto Solaris 7), and the drop of 32bit hardware in Solaris 10 for example?).

    Do you really expect Sun to support every piece of hardware they ever made forever and ever? That is a rather naive viewpoint. It would be nice to see S10 run on some 4m machines - e.g. an SS20 with 512MB RAM and dual Ross HyperSPARCs - but is it practical to expect the vendor to support these [relatively] aged machines? Of course not. Hey, you've got the code - go nuts!

    Evidence of them doing this again is in the code - note that a search for leo brings up it being in a filter of "Obsolete hardware"

    First, that should be le0, as in "Lance Ethernet 0 (zero)", the onboard NIC in 4[c,m,d] machines. Second, le0 is rather obsolete: it is (again, IIRC) a half-duplex 10Mb NIC that has been around for 12? 14? years. What is the point of supporting such an old NIC in a new OS version, particularly when the platforms containing said NIC cannot run the new OS?

    --
    I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
    1. Re:That's a rather silly statement. by sethstorm · · Score: 1


      Do you really expect Sun to support every piece of hardware they ever made forever and ever? That is a rather naive viewpoint. It would be nice to see S10 run on some 4m machines - e.g. an SS20 with 512MB RAM and dual Ross HyperSPARCs - but is it practical to expect the vendor to support these [relatively] aged machines? Of course not. Hey, you've got the code - go nuts!


      This is where you have my intents correct - Sure, you wont be able to do anything at all with an IPC/IPX, but a SS5/170 or SS10/* do have comparable numbers to the Ultra 1 (However, I wont be complaining about a ZX with quad Hypersparcs - 2xcpu per module - not being able to run, that's a heat issue). As for the ZX, it was in at 2.6, dropped in Solaris 8(couldnt do the file replacement) - the 8 bit GX based adapters have only been dropped with the whole platform at Solaris 10.

      First, that should be le0, as in "Lance Ethernet 0 (zero)", the onboard NIC in 4[c,m,d] machines. Second, le0 is rather obsolete: it is (again, IIRC) a half-duplex 10Mb NIC that has been around for 12? 14? years. What is the point of supporting such an old NIC in a new OS version, particularly when the platforms containing said NIC cannot run the new OS?

      Nope, I am referring to leo - the name for the ZX, not the 10mbit onboard ethernet.

      --
      Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
    2. Re:That's a rather silly statement. by sczimme · · Score: 1


      Sure, you wont be able to do anything at all with an IPC/IPX, but a SS5/170 or SS10/* do have comparable numbers to the Ultra 1

      Respectfully, most of the SS10 machines - even the SM51/61 - are pretty weak overall compared to the Ultra 1 (even the 170). I recently mothballed two U1s (a 170 and a 170E) because they were no longer practical ( (heat+noise) > utility ). OTOH I have a very clean SS5/110 (with the internal CD-ROM and maximum RAM) and an IPC (w/ new NVRAM) tucked away for future somethingorother. Guess I better hang on to some of those 13W3 monitors...

      Nope, I am referring to leo - the name for the ZX, not the 10mbit onboard ethernet.

      D'oh - my fault. That's the two-SBUS-slot-wide 24-bit frame buffer, right? I might have one of those in the spares bin, along with myriad other parts. Know anyone who wants to buy a pile of [working] Sun gear? :-)

      --
      I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
  68. The times they are a -changin' by T_C_Kelly · · Score: 1

    I wonder what the real reason behind this could be. First Apple announces its working with Intel, now Sun's announces it will revile part of its code. If I wasn't such a skeptic, I'd be tempted to say it's a sign of Armageddon.

    1. Re:The times they are a -changin' by Michael+Hunt · · Score: 1

      now Sun's announces it will revile part of its code

      Solaris has been reviled for some time.

  69. Vaporware no more? by halleluja · · Score: 1
    Try and grep for crap:
    Volume Management action_workman.c 396 * - correct the device crap -- NOT YET IMPLEMENTED action_xmcd.c 430 * - correct the device crap -- NOT YET IMPLEMENTED IP Filter ip_irc_pxy.c 387 * security crap. ip_ftp_pxy.c 291 * security crap.

    Secure and stable uh-huh.

  70. LOOK AT THE ROADMAP, CHILDREN by justins · · Score: 1
    When things like the 'dad' & 'uata' (IDE drivers), and 'todsg' drivers are still in the closed source tarballs, I'm not hopeful for the 'open'ness of 'opensolaris' (Come on, they can't release drivers for their own hardware clocks?! (todsg))

    If you had looked at their roadmap you'd see that there is more coming...

    http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/roadmap/
    --
    Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
  71. VIA SATA support? by Aquila+Deus · · Score: 1

    I tried Solaris 10 before but it cannot even find my hd! does it support my VIA SATA now?

    --
    hmmm... dumb...
    1. Re:VIA SATA support? by njcoder · · Score: 1

      try the support forum at http://forum.sun.com/

  72. Err, grub bootloader? by GuidoW · · Score: 1

    Meaning, grub as in GRand Unified Bootloader?

    I thought that was a GNU project...

    --
    If it's so secret, then how come I've never heard of it?
    1. Re:Err, grub bootloader? by McBofh · · Score: 1

      Yes, grub is a gnu project. That doesn't stop Sun from using it. Especially when it is clearly the best solution for booting x86/x64-based machines.

      After the bastardry which was required in order to get the previous x86/x64-bootloader to work, and the complete annoyance which was the Device Configuration Assistant, grub is like manna from heaven.

    2. Re:Err, grub bootloader? by GuidoW · · Score: 1

      Okay, that's very nice, but what puzzled me about this was that it seemed to be part of the things that had finally been released to the general public under the CDDL.
      Reading the announcement again, I guess I have been mistaken there.

      --
      If it's so secret, then how come I've never heard of it?
  73. On Boot Times by magellan · · Score: 1

    The 7 second boot was for a zone within a Solaris instance, so this was not a complete boot.

    It looks like the complete boot took 32.6 seconds.

    See:

    http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/eschrock/20050106 #boot_chart_results

  74. MOD PARENT DOWN! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    MOD DOWN! This cunt is trying to promote Jörg who is a well known anti-Apple hobbyist in Germany.

    Linux _lookalike_??
    Muahhahhahha!!!

  75. Re:Can either an "Editor" or the Poster please RTF by njcoder · · Score: 1

    My mistake. I missed the info on the charts. Looks like the 7sec boot time was for a zone running on 1 processor. The dual opteron workstation the zone ran in, booted in just over 30. Still. That's pretty fast.

  76. A refreshing blast of truth by sysadmn · · Score: 1
    Gotta love the grunts vs. suits comments on the gcc page:
    While it would probably be technically possible to provide diffs against the mainline sources, lawyers won't permit us to provide diffs that apply to multiple source files licensed differently, providing further proof that they're thoroughly isolated from any source of real-world knowledge or common sense.
    Go Team!
    --
    Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
  77. good or bad... by qaxzar · · Score: 1

    I dont like this statment in the FAQ

    "The Solaris OS is Sun's supported operating system offering. Future versions of the Solaris OS will be based on technology from the OpenSolaris project."

    perhaps i am just being cynical but it sounds to me like Sun is gonna open Solaris 10 wait for the OS community and then take all are code and put it back in their own propreity software. Has any one read the license?

    On the other hand, now we have solaris open, darwin was always open (though aqua isnt), how long till we see openO/S2 or OMG *gasp* OpenWindows(tm)?

    1. Re:good or bad... by Rikus · · Score: 1

      I have a feeling OpenWindows wouldn't be the best choice of names.

    2. Re:good or bad... by qaxzar · · Score: 1

      good point, then make it *gasp* OpenWIN32(tm)

    3. Re:good or bad... by FireDoctor · · Score: 1

      How is this different from the relationship between RedHat's proprietary products and Fedora?

      Sun is still bound by the terms of the CDDL to publish source files that are changed, and also has an interest to see the OpenSolaris community grow.

  78. Its not a full release by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You need to have closed source Solaris already installed in order to install "OpenSolaris". This is not a complete OS.

    1. Re:Its not a full release by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I assume you're viewing this web page running Linux with the open source nVidia driver installed. Or perhaps you're using a driver that exists outside the land of make believe...

  79. Re:WHY NOW? I'LL TELL YOU WHY! by anonymous22 · · Score: 0
    --
    Anyone who runs is V.C. Anyone who stands still is well-disciplined V.C.
    Door Gunner, Full Metal Jacket
  80. Who cares by codepunk · · Score: 1

    Sun means about as much to me today as MS does which is just about nothing. I don't need anything that either one of them produces and if I did I would just code it.

    --


    Got Code?
    1. Re:Who cares by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Great..any pointers to this code ?

  81. Gonna a bright, bright, Sunshiny day... by unixMafiA · · Score: 1

    A ray of Sunlight, coming at the right time

    Never have I been prouder of my (very) old Sun machines nor of my IRC nicks (DrSolaris, docSunny) than on this day. No longer do I need to feel ashamed for running Sun's own OS on SPARC, where it kicks root... and having to spend 2 minutes excusing and explaining myself at Free Software events. Sun, you made my day!

    I've cancelled my appointments for the afternoon and given my date for the evening a No honey, not tonight: I have a headache! -> and I intend to have one, too!! While ritually installing S-10 in a couple of Ultra's and a E3500 (and writing this comment in /.), I'm already halfway thru a bottle of Jack D from Tennessee, celebrating...

    Well, of course, not too exuberantly: maybe, just maybe, as someone with a sense of humour already commented above these lines those awful codewar-mongers at SCO are now going thru every single line of Solaris code to see if they might claim a few trillion or zillion dollars! And Sun has been so permissive with M$ on Java issues, maybe they let the big bad wolf in among the sheep (...) ??
    RMS, the man, told me recently that they're nothing to worry about (at least, nothing compared to the EU software patents situation, see here), but...
    As long as SCO and their none too saintly part-owner M$FT are "out there" playing their fuzzy games and trying to scare the Free Software community (confusing aspiring or new adopters), I'll not bat an eyelid. Freedom is still a fragile thing, it would seem, and needs continually to be defended!

    No sleep for the weary... but we can cautiously celebrate another little milestone, today!
    So have a Sunny day, y'all, and please help me free some of the content of my bottles of liquor in a toast to Sun :):)

    --

    * Signal 15... "Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam." Cheers cq. BRgds: DrS aka UNIXmafia@ribeco.net
  82. ...PUNK! by woah · · Score: 1

    ;)

  83. GOTOs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    > When "GOTO Considered Harmful" was written, it was THE flow-control structure. Only unthinking idiots actually believe it is never Ever EVER to be used.

    I agree with you, and I have always been prepared to use a GOTO when that is the best way to do the job ("best" means a combination of most efficient, most readable, most maintainable, most flexible, and so on).

    Now it happens that in my 25 years working as a programmer, I have never used a GOTO. But I'm still open to the idea.

    I have seen other people use GOTOs where it didn't offend me, even though I would have done it differently. I have, for example, seen people use GOTO where I would use a SELECT.

    Perhaps the most common place where the use of a GOTO seems inevitable is to jump down to some clean-up code when doing an error-return from the middle of a function. The odd thing is, though, that I never seem to get myself into that situation, because I never seem to have to do any clean up before exiting my code. Maybe I should study why that is, one day. I suspect that it has something to do with concepts like read-ahead, and late-binding, that many programmers never quite seem to grasp.

    But I digress. The point is that I have never rejected the use of GOTOs. In fact, I have written the programming standards for more than one project, and, while those standards have stated that the use of GOTOs must be justified, they have never forbidden it.

  84. Re:WHY NOW? I'LL TELL YOU WHY! by Stonent1 · · Score: 1

    The opensolaris pilot team were a group of people inside and outside of Sun that were invited to have access to NDA materials and code while the non-free code was removed from Solaris. Some examples of the pilot members were Jorg Schilling (author of cdrecord), Ben Rockwood (owner of Cuddletech.com), Al Hopper, Rich Teer (active members of the Solaris x86 community), and site owners of many Solaris freeware sites. I was included because of my project on the Gentoo forums to bring the Gentoo package management system to Solaris.

  85. Why Solaris? by lullabud · · Score: 0, Troll

    I've recently been tasked with setting up a Solaris server and I haven't touched Solaris in a long time. I've been happily using Linux for my server stuff and OS X for desktop stuff. After using Solaris for the last few days, even though I'm the one who feels used, I wonder why people are so excited about this news. I mean, I just don't see how this is better than linux, and if I were a Solaris admin I'd be running to Linux with arms wide open. I mean, `apropos` isn't working out of the box, but the man page for it hasn't been updated since Dec 20th 1996 and doesn't contain any information that I hadn't already deduced. `dhcpconfig` returned a Java library error. The text interface name is referred to countless times in the 1500+ pages of pdf manuals I have here, but nowhere did it tell me that interfaces are named bge#... or was it ie#? or le#? Honestly, the text "bge" shows up twice in the manauls in the context of the `prtdiag` command in the manual for the hardware, not Solaris itself. Commands are helpless, for instance, needing you to explicitly issue an interface name with `ifconfig` or it would just return the standard help dialog. `ifconfig -a` was no help, it also needs an explicit interface name. The manuals are awful, giving no examples and reiterating the obvious. ("2. Type the host name of the machine in the file /etc/nodename. For example, if the name of the host is tenere, type tenere in the file."... duh) The commands are not helpful and neither are the man pages, but the hardware is awesome. It just makes me wonder, why would anybody choose Solaris over Linux?

    1. Re:Why Solaris? by foorilious · · Score: 1
      Let's go through your problems:

      apropos: From the manpage you besmirch for not having been updated in 10 years:

      (first paragraph):
      This information is contained in the /usr/share/man/windex database created by catman(1M). If catman(1M) was not run, or was run with the -n option, apropos fails.
      (footer):
      SEE ALSO
      man(1), whatis(1), catman(1M), attributes(5)

      DIAGNOSTICS
      /usr/share/man/windex: No such file or directory
      This database does not exist. catman(1M) must be run
      to create it.
      Maybe it hasn't been updated because it hasn't needed to be?

      dhcpconfig: I don't know, it worked fine for me. Our two anecdotes cancel each other out, it seems.

      interface names: Yes, Solaris names the interfaces by the drivers providing them, which are in turn named for the hardware chipset (which a few exceptiosn like qfe, which stands for "quad fast ethernet" and refers to the number of chips on the cards, as opposed to the chipset). Since you seem to already know apropos, why didn't you do:
      % man -k ethernet |grep driver
      bge bge (7d) - SUNW,bge Gigabit Ethernet driver for Broadcom BCM57xx
      ce ce (7d) - Cassini Gigabit-Ethernet device driver
      ...snip...
      spwr spwr (7d) - SMC EtherPower II 10/100 (9432) Ethernet device driver
      xge xge (7d) - S2IO Xframe 10Gigabit Ethernet Network Adapter driver
      Also, I have no idea how you managed to bungle 'ifconfig -a', but it doesn't require any specific interface argument. It works almost exactly the same as on Linux ("almost", because it doesn't show you some of the interface statistics like Linux does - use kstat for that). If I were spanking-new to Solaris, I think I'd do 'ifconfig -a', and then when I saw a bge0, I'd probably try 'man bge' and what do you know?

      I've found Solaris to have really pretty excellent manpages, and docs.sun.com is very, very good. I honestly wish Red Hat for example would have documentation even a fraction as complete and good as the stuff all over docs.sun.com. There's plenty of valid things to fault Solaris for, but you've hit on none of it.
    2. Re:Why Solaris? by lullabud · · Score: 1

      Thanks for the useful info. You're totally right about the `apropos` man page. I skipped right over the description because I know what it does and I thought that's what would be there and I should've read the diagnostics, but I found the info elsewhere. It does seem odd to me that they wouldn't run the `catman` command while setting up the rest of the server info. As for my network problems, looking back on it, the problem I was having with `ifconfig` was that the interfaces weren't set up, and that's what I was trying to do. `ifconfig -a` just showed le0. The Solaris 9 manual said to create a file called "/etc/hostname.interface name" but never told me what the interfaces were supposed to be called. I had found /dev/hme so I thought that was it and wasted a bunch of time on that and other interface names I found in forums before just doing a `sys-unconfig`. I'm still trying to figure out how to get dhcp set up and I've gone through like 5 tutorials.

      I think it's sad that I'm asking an honest question, honestly frustrated with solaris, honestly trying to get Solaris to work right for me, but by expressing my frustrations and asking Solaris Guru's, who will no doubt be reading this thread, why Solaris is so much better I get modded down as a troll. I can take a firm rebuke and a disagreement in why Solaris is frustrating/better/worse, but I'm not trolling. I'm trying to frustratedly trying to configure a Solaris server.

    3. Re:Why Solaris? by foorilious · · Score: 1
      Sure - sorry for the vaguely snarky tone - I was leaning toward "troll" myself, but I believe you're genuinely frustrated now.

      I agree about not running 'catman -w' at install time. You'll find lots of things like this in Solaris. There seems to be a general philosophy of not making decisions for you, which you can get to appreciate, with time. I think they kind of assume that if you want to use apropos, you'll slap a 'catman -w' into one of your jumpstart scripts. Rememeber that it's really an OS geared for bigger corporate environments with dedicated staffs of sysadmins, not desktop users or casual passers-by. But, I do agree that it'd be nice for it to take care of that automatically. If that bugs you, you'll also be bugged trying to use sar, and a few other things that they except you to go explicitly enable. My big gripe is that they abandon that philosophy when it comes to which network services they'll enable - they enable pretty much all of them and expect you to go explicitly turn off the ones you don't want - in stark contrast with the general philosophy of asking you to explicitly turn on the stuff you do want. But, again, really, this is all very superficial stuff. It's not nearly enough to condemn an OS by. You just turn on the stuff you want and turn off the stuff you don't, and if you're in Sun's historical customer demographic, then you're a corporate sysadmin just adding stuff to your jumpstart scripts.

      Sorry too that I didn't understand what your beef with ifconfig was. Yes, ifconfig won't show you any interfaces that haven't been "plumbed." The concept of plumbing an interface doesn't exist in Linux, of course. I don't have a Solaris machine handy to play with this second, so I can't tell you a sure-fire and elegant way to get a list of all valid-but-unplumbed interfaces, but I know it can be done. In fact, one of the Solaris install scripts does it (I believe that if you bomb out of an install or toss yourself out of a begin/finish script at the right place, and do an 'ifconfig -a', you'll see all the interfaces on the box plumbed up). I'm not suggesting that's a valid way to do it, just pointing out that it must be possible, because Solaris itself does it. Here's a hack I came up with that should do it:
      kstat -p | grep -a link_up | awk -F: '{print $1$2}' | sort -u
      By the way, comp.unix.solaris is a great resource, full of very smart and helpful people (many of whom work for Sun, including several kernel engineers) who have always spent a lot of time answering all sorts of questions, from newbie to insanely technical and complex. Some people also like BigAdmin, and of course SunSolve and docs.sun.com are invaluable. Make sure especially to check out the System Administration Guide on docs.sun.com.

      Keep an open mind and be patient - it's definitely an acquired taste, especially for someone coming from Linux, but I personally think it's a truly great and unique OS that's totally worth the effort.
    4. Re:Why Solaris? by lullabud · · Score: 1

      You know, I was out walking at lunch and I realized that this OS seems geared towards a more knowledgable, learned audience who have been trained or educated in how to use it, which is definitely not the crowd I fall into. An old co-worker had used it in the Airforce, I sure which he had been tasked with this! I was reading and reading and reading through these manuals and I did find a bunch of stuff where I thought "Damn, I've always wanted that ability in linux/windows/os x." This seems like a bigger change from Linux than BSD was, and I guess I wasn't expecting that. Still terribly frustrated... No worries about the tone of your reply, and thanks again for all the info. I'll probably be sorting through that newsgroup over the next few days, but I already downloaded every pdf from dosc.sun.com that has anything to do with Solaris 9, IP services, etc.. Right now I'm trying to figure out why examples from the manual for dhcpconfig return errors. Didn't expect to see Java errors in the terminal, especially on textbook examples:

      bash-2.05# dhcpconfig -D -r SUNWfiles -p /etc/dhcp
      Created DHCP configuration file.
      Created dhcptab.
      Added "Locale" macro to dhcptab.
      dhcpconfig: Error - creating server macro for server java.lang.NullPointerException.


      Hmm... maybe it's a hostname problem. Anyhow, thanks again for all the info.

    5. Re:Why Solaris? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      # ifconfig -a plumb

      will try to plumb all interfaces present in the system. After that they should be visible when you type

      # ifconfig -a

  86. WWSD? by bad_outlook · · Score: 1

    What Will SCO Do?

    Instances of SCO code usage in OpenSolaris

    Not that we care, but you know, we should in light of their accusations against Linux.

    bo

  87. opensolaris.org by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    About the image on the main site with "open" written in different languages.. Anybody knows if one of them is in Chinese? "Libre" in French means "free". Too bad China won't get a taste of OpenSolaris!

  88. Re:Can either an "Editor" or the Poster please RTF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Big of you to acknowledge your minor error.

    Editors - you farked up too, so let's hear it...Go on, just once...

  89. PowerBook by himself · · Score: 1

    I just installed it on my 15" PowerBook, and it certainly feels snappier.

  90. Larry McVoy did NOT design Teamware by NatteringNabob · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Larry McVoy designed a prototype called 'NSE Lite' which was based on concepts developed by Eric Schmidt and Bunker Lampson which were incorporated into NSE which was built by a host of people including, but not limited to, Jon Fieber, Marty Honda, Ethan Adams, Terry Miller, David Hendricks, and Jill Foley. Larry McVoy had absolutely nothig to do with NSE or the core concepts of copy-modify-merge except for being an unhappy NSE customer. Glenn Skinner is listed as the patent author for 'smoosh' which is the central technology to both NSE-lite and Teamware. Larry claims that he is co-inventor. I don't know, I was in the NSE group, Larry was in the OS group at the time. Teamware itself was designed and implemented by Ethan Adams, Terry Miller, Jill Foley, Mark Sabiers, Lewie Knapp, Josh Sirota and Mitchell Nguyen. Larry's primary contribution was to complain a lot. Larry is a bright guy, but he didn't design Teamware anymore than Bill Joy designed Unix. He deserves a tremendous amount of credit for sucessfully productizing the technologies invented by the NSE team (and a lot of others) something that Sun, with substantially more resources, was unable to do, but it is an extreme stretch to call Larry the designer of Teamware (even though if Larry thinks so).

  91. Solaris' strengths by gCGBD · · Score: 1

    Solaris 10 is light years ahead of Linux in terms of reliability, fault tolerance, and scalability.

    Their support infrastructure is amongst the best in the industry.

    Where it lags is in easy, quick, cutting edge and fancy little tools (of which Linux has more than its share).

    This is mostly the result of a stabilizing bureaucracy and carefully directed architecture.

    It sure ain't "SVR4" any more though.

    For years it hasn't been very clear where they are going with the OS. With Solaris 10 we are starting to see.

    Where else are you going to turn, when you've got to run big jobs - HP? AIX? Mainframes?

    I'd consider rolling out Linux or BSD on the little servers.

    But for the big boys, Solaris is the way to go.

    So then as a technology manager you would have to wonder, why deal with different support contracts, different vendors, different employee skill sets and development tools - when you can get everything from one place?

    Besides, once the Linux standards are finally cast, Sun promises "Solaris will be Linux", that it will meet all of the standards.

    Cool stuff.

    OpenSourcing it further strengthens the product, if for no other reason, than allowing their user community the ability to go in and see what is under the covers for themselves.

    I'm glad they were able to finally follow through with the promise to open this up.

    --

    O=='=++
    1. Re:Solaris' strengths by CoolVibe · · Score: 1

      Could you maybe use more paragraphs next time?

  92. Told You So by turgid · · Score: 1

    Oh ye of little faith.

  93. Re: My fave so far... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    that is actually part of SUN's source code and not already known previously open source stuff. /*
    * Now, we need to initialize the control table with some
    * good poop.
    */

    It is in db_nis.c.

  94. Still... by otis+wildflower · · Score: 1

    ... if it were released opensource, the ironing would be delicious...

    1. Re:Still... by NatteringNabob · · Score: 1

      In any rational universe, Sun would have released Teamware under the GPL when they end-of-lifed it three years ago. But we're talking about Sun. It contains (as far as I know) no technology licensed from third parties. Sun's primary problem was that the sole purpose of Teamware, other than to facilitate Solaris development, was to sell more Sun hardware, so among other things, true cross platform support never happened. The real irony is that Claire Giordano is one of the drivers for Open Solaris and she was also on the NSE/Teamware team (as well as Claeton Giardano - sorry for the slight Claire and Claeton :-)) so she is certainly aware of the product. Hopefully it will finally happen.GPL would be better, but CDDL is better than nothing, I guess.

  95. Mod parent up please! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The last paragraph looks to be extremely important.

  96. Law of Socretas by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    P1. There are pirates.
    P2. There are copyright's violators.

    P3. The pirates always violate the copyrightes.

    I1. The pirates are copyright's violators.
    I2. The copyright's violators are pirates.

    I3. There always are pirates and copyright's violators.

    I99. The pirates and copyright's violators always delete the licenses.

  97. Unix by Quantam · · Score: 1

    I see that Solaris 10 is a licensed Unix 2003 product. Is OpenSolaris, as well? Wouldn't that be a really bad thing for Linux, if it were? I mean, why use a free Unix clone when you can use a free, professionally built Unix system?

    --
    You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
  98. Re:Can either an "Editor" or the Poster please RTF by snoofy · · Score: 1

    are you sure he didn't run a zone ... that takes only 3sec ....

  99. FSF weighs in: this is NOT GPL-COMPATIBLE by Khopesh · · Score: 1
    The Free Software Foundation lists the OpenSolaris CDDL as a GPL-Incompatible, Free Software License
    Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL)
    This is a free software license which is not a strong copyleft; it has some complex restrictions that make it incompatible with the GNU GPL. That is, a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the CDDL cannot legally be linked together. We urge you not to use the CDDL for this reason.

    Also unfortunate in the CDDL is its use of the term "intellectual property".
    See also the OpenSolaris Licensing page
    --
    Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
  100. Extra! Extra! by Un+pobre+guey · · Score: 1
    "Extra! Extra! OpenSolaris Code Released!" shouted the paper boy. Suddenly the cacophany in the cantina abruptly ceased. Drinkers stopped with their mugs of beer and shots of whisky in mid air, mouths agape. Card sharps shifted their gaze, pool hustlers turned their heads. All focused an intense gaze on the paper boy just ouside the window.

    "Extra! Extra! OpenSolaris Code Released!" shouted the paper boy once more. Just as suddenly as they had stopped, drinkers resumed their drinking, pool games played on, card players continued their dubious gambits. A brawl seemed to be brewing at the end of the bar, and the paper boy was quickly forgotten.

  101. So what EXACTLY has been released? by mnmn · · Score: 1

    Apparently the kernel and some core OS pieces have been released as OPEN while some 'binary stuff' is still closed.

    Does anyone care to share if the free stuff alone is enough to have a bootable and runnable system? Do we have libc, init, /bin/* /kernel/* etc?

    BTW I saw nVidia has released drivers for Solaris too as of June 1st. The free OS market suddenly is crowded... for the better.

    --
    "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
    1. Re:So what EXACTLY has been released? by ahl_at_sun · · Score: 1

      Apparently the kernel and some core OS pieces have been released as OPEN while some 'binary stuff' is still closed.

      Everything that could be released was. The pieces that were excluded were things to which Sun doesn't own the rights (e.g. certain 3rd party drivers).

      Does anyone care to share if the free stuff alone is enough to have a bootable and runnable system? Do we have libc, init, /bin/* /kernel/* etc?

      There's enough there (depending on your device situation), and it's been done, but it's kind of a pain. It's much easier to install Solaris 10 or Solaris Express and then slap down your own bits on top of that. Everything you mention is there:
      libc - usr/src/lib/libc
      init - usr/src/cmd/init
      /bin/* - usr/src/cmd
      /kernel/* - usr/src/uts

  102. Re:FSF weighs in: this is NOT GPL-COMPATIBLE by bullitB · · Score: 1

    That's a feature.

    What possible reason does the FSF have to give the CDDL their approval? The foundation has made it clear that they do not wish people to use and/or contribute to non-GNU projects. Approval of the CDDL would very likely cause a number of people to abandon GNU/Linux.

    It sounds, however, that the CDDL *is* compatible with other OSI-approved but not FSF-approved licenses (APSL, MPL). Maybe some sharing of code between these projects (say, Solaris code in Darwin? other way around?) would encourage a change in attitude at the FSF.

  103. Solaris vs Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How is this different from/better than oprofile on Linux?

    1. Re:Solaris vs Linux by eviltypeguy · · Score: 1

      oprofile monitors the whole system at last check...

      DTrace lets you go from the kernel down to the program, and it has a very functional scripting language 'D' that lets you do things that at last check where near impossible to do in oprofile.

  104. Solaris Source Code... by hackus · · Score: 1

    Mmmm.....

    I guess some questions I have:

    1) Can I download the entire tree and make changes to the source code, and run my own versions of Solaris, and allow people to download them and improve upon my improvements?

    How about the build chain, do they publish the tools to compile the OS?

    If you can't do that, this intiative will die, or wither as it will not be able to compete against the Penguin Armamda in Suns skies.
    (i.e. most Linux engineers just don't care.)

    2) Can you redistribute the code you modify under the GNU License.

    GNU=Why Linux is Great.

    At least in my opinion from the stand point of insuring copyrights are enforced by authors who contribute AND no single entity can take over the OS and screw its user community.

    3) What sort of support is SUN planning for those who run a different version of the OS and deploy it in there organizations?

    -Hack

    --
    Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
    1. Re:Solaris Source Code... by FireDoctor · · Score: 1

      1) Simple answer: YES

      2) From a CDDL standpoint, I think so, but you might not be able to from a GNU standpoint:

      http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/faq/licensing_ faq/#dual-licensing

      Read up on the copyleft in the CDDL, it might be sufficient for your needs.

      3) Solaris, at some point, is intended to be a distro of OpenSolaris. Sun will support Solaris. Other distros based on OpenSolaris will have their own support mechanisms.

  105. Search for Linux etc. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Here are, in my opinion, some more interesting searches:

    - linux
    - windows
    - aix
    - microsoft
    - fsf
    - foundation
    - novell
    - sco
    - kerberos
    - smb
    - mozilla
    - netscape
    - java
    - apache

    I'll leave it up to others to interpret the results.

    - - - - -

    This part is just filler to overcome the Slashdot lameness filter. I tried putting the links on just one line, which was a mess. I tried adding filler text to the end of each line, which was a mess. Now I am just adding useless text. It has taken me longer to overcome the Slashdot lameness filter than it took to write my post in the first place. I don't see any point to this, since the people who want to post crap are still able to do it, by adding text to the end, like I am doing. Also, moderation can do a better job. So, instead of making honest posters like me jump through hoops, how about doing something useful, like adding a "-2" moderation level, which can only be assigned by official Slashdot admins (to avoid abuse by the astroturfers etc.) to hide the real crap. Then I could browse at "-1" to see the valid opinions that have been modded down as trolls, without running into the pornographic crap. People who wanted to reach "-2" to check for abuse should be able to select it manually, of course. But, if Slashdot still wants to have a lameness filter, then how about giving me a way to override it, without having to mess up the site with this useless filler.

  106. bloatware? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    was it just me?
    "The Bloatware guys are working on Polaris which.."

  107. any interest in Apple PPC? by micromuncher · · Score: 1

    Anyone interested in trying to port this beast to Apple PPC/NuBUS hardware with me? I'd love to replace my last incarnations of MacOS seeing as OSX doesn't support older hardware and MkLinux was killed. :-)

    --
    /\/\icro/\/\uncher
    1. Re:any interest in Apple PPC? by McBofh · · Score: 1

      Check out the discussion forum at PowerPC port of OpenSolaris. Cyril Plisko is a name to watch for.

  108. Re:FSF weighs in: this is NOT GPL-COMPATIBLE by Khopesh · · Score: 1

    According to Eben Moglen (the one-man legal team behind the Free Software Foundation), Sun sold its soul to Microsoft for funding, which required them to not release Solaris 10 with the GPL itself; Eben had been working with Sun to make that happen, and that they suddenly changed course to help fund the construction of Fujitsu's new manufacturing plants (to compete with IBM's new smaller chip core size and thus possibly get Sun back into the UNIX server world ... a giant step backards).

    OpenSolaris's use of the non-GPL compliant CDDL is possibly a preventive step to appease the MS lawyers.

    --
    Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
  109. Re:FSF weighs in: this is NOT GPL-COMPATIBLE by be-fan · · Score: 1

    It has nothing to do with the "approval" of the FSF. The GPL defines certain terms, the CDDL defines certain terms, and the two just aren't compatible. The FSF can't "change" its "attitude" about the CDDL any more than it can retroactively change the licensing of the enormous amount of code that has been put under the GPL over the last decade.

    I love how twits like you spin this as a fault of the FSF. What were they supposed to do? Prognosticate the terms of the CDDL in 2005 when they wrote the GPL 14 years ago? Sun had a choice: be GPL compatible, and be able to take advantage of the huge amount of GPL code that's out there, or not be GPL compatible. Since their license came (much) later, it was up to them to either play with the community, or not. They chose not to. That's their right, but don't get uppity at people who point out that Sun's decision is a major constraint in what code can be used in OpenSolaris and where OpenSolaris code can be used.

    --
    A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
  110. Sparc32 Support? by airbatica · · Score: 1

    Anyone know if the sun4m line of hardware is going to be supported?

    1. Re:Sparc32 Support? by McBofh · · Score: 1

      No it is not, and no it will not be supported.

  111. Re:FSF weighs in: this is NOT GPL-COMPATIBLE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Terrible conspiracy theory. CDDL is a much better fit than GPL for Sun's customers -- nearly all of whom do proprietary development.

  112. No ZFS and No Containers on x86/amd64 by Your+Average+Joe · · Score: 1

    since the cool things in Solaris 10 are missing on the NON-Sparc platform it looks to be another UNIX toy... I have never been able to get any of our MCAD software ported to Solaris/X86 even though the software exist on the Sparc platform... :-(

    --
    Your Average Joe
    1. Re:No ZFS and No Containers on x86/amd64 by FireDoctor · · Score: 1

      ZFS is not released yet. When it is done, it will be released in binary form to Solaris Express, and in source form to OpenSolaris, and will be for both SPARC and x86.

      Zones/Containers work on x86/amd64, so I don't know what the poster is talking about.

      As for your MCAD software, post the name of the vendor and put some public pressure on them.

  113. They grabbed me by mph_az · · Score: 1

    Then they hit me
    Then they told me
    They don't like me

    --Zappa

  114. Fun with dtrace by spaceyhackerlady · · Score: 1

    I actually used dtrace for the first time to solve a real problem the other day at work. As opposed to just playing with it, which I've been doing for a while.

    So why is the OS looking for libfoo.so in those places? Hmmm...must be somthing wrong with LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Quick edit, restart, problem solved.

    Cool.

    ...laura who works for people who don't trust Windoze for anything that matters

  115. Re:FSF weighs in: this is NOT GPL-COMPATIBLE by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

    And the GPL is not BSD compatible. Who cares? Both licenses are Free Software. If you want to make code compatible with everything, release it as public domain (or MIT licensed).

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  116. Solaris clone that uses no binary driver!! by maitas · · Score: 1

    AFAIK Shillin my resume is the same as OpenSolaris without any binary part.

  117. and why not? by cahiha · · Score: 1

    GNU had a big hand in making Solaris a success: when Sun was still successful at universities and in research, everybody was installing GNU tools and X11 on Solaris.

  118. Will they change to GPL or other license? by yongjhen · · Score: 1
    I read this from their CDDL FAQ:
    If you wanted a copyleft license, why didn't you just use the GPL or LGPL?
    We needed an open source license that allowed files released under the license to be linked with files released under other licenses, since initially we will not be able to release the source for all of Solaris. While a license like LGPL would allow this for dynamically linked code, we also needed to be able to release software that statically links source files available under different licenses. In addition, we wanted to allow others to add extensions to OpenSolaris with different license terms. This was only possible under a license like the MPL; however, we could not use the MPL because it is not a "template" license allowing reuse by others. Consequently we crafted a new variant of the MPL, taking the opportunity to make it a template license as a step towards reducing license proliferation for others finding themselves in the same position as us.
    Does it mean, when one day ALL the source of Solaris is open, they will change the license for it?