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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!'"
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.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
They employ sexy-code formatting monkeys. The solaris kernel is a hack of a lot simpler to understand than the Linux kernel - I hege this on my comparison of the sources a while back.
There is still no mighty IOKit killer on the horizon tho... Apple (and libkern, the cpp runtine) wins.
Matt
With ZFS you can smash a hard drive and keep the system running:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=CN6iDzesEs0
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
I've played around with ZFS, it's very cool. I mean very very cool.
It's a crying shame the licensing issues keep it from being ported to Linux as part of the kernel
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
I'm installing it right now. It looks like a copy of Ubuntu. It has a LiveCD, standard GNOME desktop, and an online package manager (called pkg).
Don't take that as criticism. Cloning Ubuntu is probably the best design decision an OS team can make these days.
Personally, I don't care whether it's Solaris or Ubuntu or *BSD underneath it all, so long as it supports my hardware and runs my applications.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Not bloody likely. Even a "clean-room" interpretation of ZFS will run afoul of Sun's patents, and those patents are only licensed under the CDDL.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
Given what's happening to SCO lately, how valid is the license that Sun purchased to allow them to release the source code to Solaris?
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Then you don't really understand the file system. Seriously, I think this is the BEST reason to look at Solaris .. ZFS is amazing: snapshots; Z-RAID; Zetabyte file ssytem; prevention of bit rot ...
... you don't care about your photos, docs and music???
They have also forcibly crashed it over a million time and it has never lost data even once. Try doing that with your home PC.
And what
is that ZFS, despite all its goodness, lacks some incredibly basic features compared to 99% of the hardware and software RAID and LVM systems out there. You can't grow (please pay attention here) a ZFS pool except by adding similarly-redundant vdevs, and there is no way to remove a vdev from a pool, unlike LVM2.
So. Got a 4-drive RAID-Z2 array, and you want to add more space by buying another drive to add in to your 5-bay hot-swap cage? You're shit outta luck. If you have a zpool with a vdev that consists of a pair of mirrored drives, you CAN add another vdev of two drives, then another, etc. You also CAN replace the drives in a vdev with larger drives. That's kind of half-okay, but still not on par with RAID cards of a DECADE ago. Even Linux's MD can grow RAID5/6 across more devices!
Someone suggested the ability to grow redundant pools by single devices, and the reaction amongst solaris ZFS developers (!!!) was "now why would you want to do that?", and then when THAT was explained, "well shucks, I wonder how they do that" (they = almost every hardware and software RAID solution on the planet.)
Absolutely astounding that a Solaris filesystem developer would not be able to at least guess as to how a RAID5 array would be re-striped to add a new drive.
Far as I know, they've been working on the grow capability for more than a year and we have yet to see it.
Please help metamoderate.
No this is Debian.
Sorry, I'm calling you on your B.S. Sun fanboy.
ZFS is *not* ready for production.
I'm a working Solaris admin. I can point to several ZFS raidz arrays that have had to be recovered from tape due to ZFS bugs losing & corrupting data.
This is clearly a case of ZFS marketing outstripping ZFS reality. They have implemented all the cool features, but have dropped the ball on robustness.
Do a sunsolve search for ZFS panics or ZFS corruption. There are a half-dozen major bugs that are still un-resolved, and won't be until Sol10u6 - if then. [u5 was just released in the last week or so]
rho
Novell taking on SCO is one thing, Novell taking on Sun is quite another. Sun is a much bigger company than Novell and a lot more money. It's not worth the fight.
It seems like SCO stiffed Novell by not giving them their cut of the licenses, but that doesn't mean the licenses they gave were invalid. If that was the case, the issue would have come up already.
Novell gets some good publicity in their fight against SCO, but in reality, they're not much of a player in anything. SuSE isn't that popular, at some point their revenues for their legacy products will dry up, and then what's left? There revenue has been declining for years and their profits have been iffy. All they're going to get out of the SCO trial is some pats on the back since SCO doesn't have any more money.
While there's no arguing that what SCO did was messed up, I don't really see Novell in a good light either. Novell purchased the rights to Unix for $300mil. The transaction between Novell and SCO was for about $120-150Mill. So SCO paid about half of what Novell paid and only gets 5% in licensing fees and no patent or copyrights according to Novell.
This just doesn't seem right to me. Either Novell seriously screwed over SCO and they were too stupid to know it, or something else is going on. Ray Noorda, who was CEO of Novell, left to start Caldera. Noorda is undeniably the reason Novell was who they were. From what I could gather they did have a good relationship.
Bottom line, I don't understand how Novell can claim they pretty much just sold a 5% commission deal for 50% of what they paid and act like their shit doesn't stink either.
According the wikipedia Up to his death, Noorda owned the Canopy Group. One of its holdings, Caldera Systems, purchased the Unix assets in 1995 from the Santa Cruz Operation, which had acquired them from Novell. In 1996 it also acquired the Digital Research assets from Novell and immediately brought a lawsuit against Microsoft that largely duplicated the claims that the FTC and Department of Justice had pursued in the early 1990s. The lawsuit was ultimately settled in 2000 with a $275 million payment to Caldera. Every time one of Norda's companies purchases something that used to belong to Novell, they sue. Usually Microsoft (Noorda hated MS).
Sorry but it just seems fishy to me. How would Novell not expect that SCO/Caldera would ultimately sue. Maybe Novell was aware of a possible lawsuit to attack RedHat while they were making moves with SuSE?
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Read the transcripts. Novell sent Sun a letter before they open sourced Solaris to warn them that their license from SCO was invalid. Now they're asking the court to rule that this is the case, and Judge Kimball has given every indication that he's willing to do so.
I imagine that the folks at Sun have been pretty nervous since last August. Imagine, paying millions of dollars to put your product in exactly the position you've been (erroneously) proclaiming your competition is in. Not smart.
...IPS were better than apt?
It's designed by (deb)Ian Murdock, with 15 years of hindsight.