OpenSolaris Indiana Released

Lally Singh writes "The Linux-friendly OpenSolaris Indiana has been released! A new, modern package manager and all the goodies of Solaris: ZFS, DTrace, SMF, and Xen on a LiveCD that was designed for Linux users. 'Why use the OpenSolaris OS you ask? It's pretty simple, you'll find it full of unique features like the new Image Packaging System (IPS), ZFS as the default filesystem, DTrace enabled packages for extreme observability and performance tuning, and many many more. We think you'll be quite happy to came by to take a look!'"

Comments

Re:Still not sold

[gardyloo]

I'm tempted to tinker with ZFS just for its snapshotting abilities. You don't have to run a server to find that useful.

Indiana...

[Stele]

We named the dog Indiana.

Re:Still not sold

[jedidiah]

I am not even sure I can get worked up about Solaris anymore even for "serious work".

That train already left the station.

It's not just good enough that you make something cool but you should also make it available when people want it rather than 10 years later.

Now Sun has to put on a good showing just to keep from looking silly.

Although this is ultimatey a good thing as it's one of the key benefits of free market competition.

Re:Still not sold

[QX-Mat]

I'm missing g's and e's :(

As a proud LDD touting, LWN gazing, MSc wielding geek; the Solaris kernel is a heck of a lot better coded, structured and organised than the Linux kernel. But alas, it lacks the many new features that have truly driven linux over the last decade.

Naturally my opinions lie with the ease of code readability and ease of initial development - these are not the same as a lkml hardened pro

Linux-friendly = GPL-compliant license

[spikenerd]

therefore, it is *not* Linux-friendly

Re:Who cares?

[njcoder]

I assert that it's too little, too late. If Solaris had been freed in the early part of the century, it might have made some headway against Linux. As it is, it'll be stripped of anything useful and portable and will be as irrelevant as HP/UX or OpenVMS for all but locked-in legacy users. This is an idiotic statement and I can't believe anyone modded you up. The source for OpenSolaris has been available for years. When will the stripping start? Where is ZFS for Linux? Where is DTrace, Zones, or any of the other cool new stuff?

Those are just some of the big items that get mentioned. Solaris' resource management and auditing tools are very impressive and I haven't seen anything comparable in linux that can give as much control for as little overhead.

Re:Hey! It's Debian!

[njcoder]

Crap. gnome?! WTF is wrong with people? Sun put a lot of time and money into GNOME when they were working on JDS. Most notably in the accessibility features of GNOME.

GNOME is also the default for most mainstream linux distributions that Sun would want to position OpenSolaris against. RHEL, SuSE, CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora.

You should be able to compile KDE, or you can get a precompiled package on blastwave.org.

Re:Hey! It's [not] Debian!

[felixdzerzhinsky]

It's not Debian. Debian has had the ability to fully encrypt the root partition during installation since Sarge I think. Etch for sure. Ubuntu can do it too with the alternate installer. OpenSuse and Slackware have excellent docs on how to get / file encryption. Disk Encryption is essential for laptops and removable media in 2008. If Solaris wants to get adopted by government and financial sectors for use on laptops it will need to have some form of serious disk encryption. To be fair to the OpenSolaris people there are two teams working on encryption solutions but I think they lag well behind Linux or even Windows (Truecrypt) solutions. Two in development projects: Crypto in the lofi(7D) driver (a bit like dm-crypt on Linux or FileVault on MacOS X): http://opensolaris.org/os/project/loficc/ due to integrate soon. and ZFS Crypto which is still in development but due to integrate this summer. http://opensolaris.org/os/project/zfs-crypto/ However neither of these provide for an encrypted root filesystem as they aren't full disk encryption solutions. However with ZFS Crypto all of your home directory and other datasets (filesystems) with sensitive data can be encrypted. I for one welcome my Sun Microsystems overlords...actually I am glad to see another alternative to Windows becoming more accessible to the masses. I have my copy in bittorrent now ready to install in my [Sun Microsystems] Virtualbox 1.6.0 Congratulations to the Project Indiana Team!