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OpenSolaris 2008.11 Released, Reviewed

Posted by timothy on from the solar-microsystems dept.

ab5tract writes "2008.11 has been released and can be downloaded here. There's a review at Ars Technica. Also, there's a good overview of the new TimeSlider feature at dZone."

87 comments

  1. Okay, so it's more of a... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... _decent_ overview of TimeSlider ;)

    - ab5tract

  2. Mostly Positive by javacowboy · · Score: 5, Informative

    I installed it on my 2nd PC (1st is a Mac). Since I hadn't partitioned my hard drive, I dared to install it over my Ubuntu installation, even though the Live CD didn't detect my ethernet card. It wasn't much of a risk, since I hadn't been using my 2nd PC over the last few months.

    Since then, I haven't looked back. I found the driver for my network card on the vendor's site and installed it. It worked right away. After that, I was ready to roll.

    I had run the previous version within a VM, and found it to be severely lacking. The newest version is much improved.

    The package manager, although not yet perfect, is far more usable. It's possible to add new repositories from the GUI, and the performance is much improved. There's a GUI update manager, so that OS updates install more easily. Compiz runs really smoothly, and it's just generally more stable. I haven't tried Time Slider yet, but I've heard really good things about it. It has the latest version of Java installed, and the JDK and Netbeans are but a few clicks away. Overall, it's just feels snappier and crisper.

    Granted, there are still annoying kinks to be worked out. The available packages still pale in comparison to Ubuntu.

    Also, the community is pretty good. The opensolaris.com forum has been responsive.

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    This space left intentionally blank.
    1. Re:Mostly Positive by Carnildo · · Score: 1

      Is it yet ready for use on Sun hardware? As of six months ago, if you had a Sparc-based system without an OS, you'd be much better off installing Linux or *BSD on it.

      --
      "They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
    2. Re:Mostly Positive by armanox · · Score: 2, Informative

      The sparc port of OpenSolaris is still in progress. There are other flavor's of solaris that run on Sparc hardware though.

      --
      I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
    3. Re:Mostly Positive by PipsqueakOnAP133 · · Score: 1

      The fact that you can go to a vendor site and download drivers and not have to recompile your kernel totally makes my day.

  3. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  4. Ars Technica by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Gah! Ars Technica serve their style sheets from a subdomain called media. That's a common place to serve adverts from so naturally it's in the Adblock list.

    The site looks shit, stop linking to it.

    1. Re:Ars Technica by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I take it you've never actually read Ars before. It's a great site. Learn to control your plugin-ins or fuck off.

  5. Re:I'm curious by javacowboy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here's a list of new features in the latest release:

    http://www.opensolaris.com/learn/features/whats-new/200811/

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    This space left intentionally blank.
  6. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  7. Re:I'm curious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    For anyone that's actually downloaded and played with it, are there actually any benefits to openSolaris from your normal Linux distro (Redhat/Ubuntu/Whatever) besides zfs?

    1) SMF - replaces init scripts and is much more sophisticated. You can declare service dependencies, startup order, what to do when it fails to start, etc. It also has nice command line tools to start/stop/monitor services.

    2) Containers & Resource Manager : you can run an application such as Oracle in a completely secure container. If it is compromised (ie root access) it can't hurt the root zone or other containers on the system. Resource manager lets you tell the system to give these 2 cpu cores to this container, 1 core to that container, etc. You can divy up memory to specific containers, set network and disk IO quotas, etc.

    3) DTrace - there are tools with dozens of pre-written dtrace scripts and visualizations to help you peer into running production applications without having to restart, without having to use debug symbols, a profiler, etc. It doesn't affect performance of production apps. Plus, Sun has added hundreds or thousands of dtrace probes into postgres, mysql, glassfish, java, solaris kernel, etc. to give you great visibility.

    4) zfs - i'm sure you've heard a lot about it. Another neat thing you can do with it is give a zfs "partition" to a zone, and let the administrator of a zone manage it however he/she wants to without giving them access to manage zfs for other zones.

    5) server performance is supposed to be better than linux. For example, they improved TCP/IP stack performance by over 300% in solaris 10

    6) Cost. For the same level of support, it's cheaper than Windows and RedHat.

  8. Re:I'm curious by RiotingPacifist · · Score: 1

    er, why should i care about COMSTAR? given that its the only feature not in your standard linux distro

    --
    IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
  9. Re:I'm curious by LWATCDR · · Score: 1

    I think ZFS is probably a very big advantage for some. Add in Containers and DTrace and you have some pretty nice features.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  10. how impoverished a dev environment would you stand by museumpeace · · Score: 1
    just to run on a box that didn't have thousands of ready-to-run exploits pinging you every hour? from TFA:

    If you are doing any kind of development that reaches outside of Sun's ecosystem, then you are much better off on Linux. If you are doing Java development with Netbeans, then the OpenSolaris repository has you totally covered.

    --
    SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
  11. Re:I'm curious by Anthony_Cargile · · Score: 5, Interesting

    True. I installed OpenSolaris (after years of experience with "plain" Solaris/SunOS) on my personal laptop next to Windows XP, Ubuntu 8.04, Mac OS X Leopard (hackintosh) and Fedora whatever-it-was-at-the-time, and I could not tell them apart graphically, or as far as applications go unless I was at a command line.

    OpenSolaris comes with the original lex, flex, and similar vintage goodies (and their source), but honestly in a non-networked environment, I could give a rip about installing it over Ubuntu or PCLinux OS at this point, I'm afraid.

    I would, however, support installing it in a networked environment because of Sun's support for NFS (or sshfs rather) and NIS (/kerberos) right out of the box, something open source systems OpenSolaris tends to copy have yet to completely master (don't read into that too much, I know there is a thing called "design patterns").

    On my laptop, though, I uninstalled it after about a week and slapped "plain" Solaris 10 in its place, for both nostalgia with CDE and a fresh look with JDE and an even better set of built in tools. I love open source software, but as far as Solaris preferences go, I like sun's current Solaris 10 over OpenSolaris currently, and the fact most of the FOSS operating systems are starting to become cookie cutter-like is not helping.

    I know this may be just what the FOSS community doesn't want to hear, but it just provides room for improvement given the standard the original Solaris set for me (and Fedora will never be quite as hardened as RHEL ;).

  12. Re:I'm curious by saintsfan · · Score: 1

    this is my understanding (and some more)- basically that solaris is more useful as a server and less interesting as a desktop. at least, that's what i used to use solaris for.. back when you still had to pay for it.

  13. When does the important stuff arrive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    (Open)Solaris is neat, I'm a die hard Solaris fan when it comes to servers. And sure, ZFS is pretty neat with regards to its capabilities. It can save expand, shrink, create snapshots, reroll them and so on. All in all it is indeed a pretty amazing filesystem, extremely flexible and its almost suited for full serious use.

    EXCEPT one very important feature and I can't believe that so many people seem perfectly willing to disregard the whole issue as a non-issue...

    When oh when will we be able to create *useable* external backups on ZFS? I'm well aware that you can dump a ZFS snapshot to stdout and then do whatever you like with it (dump it on tape, dump it on another box using an SSH tunnel, or even dump it to /dev/null ;-)) but thats exactly my point. This is absolutely not the usefull way to backup your data externally.

    Because once you need to restore this data (Mr. Doe lost a very important file 2 weeks ago, only noticed it today and needs to be restored ASAP) your only option on ZFS will be to import the whole damned snapshot again. I dunno about you but I am *not* too thrilled about having to import a whole homedir slice just to restore one frickin file. I think its really a major drag that with an filesystem which is praised to be "enterprise worthy" it still lacks a simple but useful backup tool like dump/restore.

    And yes: I'm well aware that the ZFS crowd is probably going to get back to "if you need a solid backup you should buy good software" or (IMO even worse:) "whats stopping you from using tar". Thats really missing the whole point here... An enterprise based filesystem, open sourced and all, and it can't even do something as simple which ext2, ext3, xfs and yes; even UFS could do for YEARS?

    So... Cool, opensolaris has a timeslider. As long as they aim this at the end user I'll fully agree that its pretty neat and amazing. But I sure hope that Sun doesn't leave their faithful admins standing in the cold. As long as this issue isn't covered my servers remain on UFS. Sun; DO SOMETHING!

    1. Re:When does the important stuff arrive? by Galactic+Dominator · · Score: 1

      When oh when will we be able to create *useable* external backups on ZFS? I'm well aware that you can dump a ZFS snapshot to stdout and then do whatever you like with it (dump it on tape, dump it on another box using an SSH tunnel, or even dump it to /dev/null ;-)) but thats exactly my point. This is absolutely not the usefull way to backup your data externally.

      If you work on a *nix based system, but can't see the value of pipes why are you working on a *nix system? It's so easy a fanboi could do it.

      --
      brandelf -t FreeBSD /brain
    2. Re:When does the important stuff arrive? by larry+bagina · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Why not pair up a zfs send with a zfs receive to make an external backup? Then mount the external backup snapshot as needed?

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    3. Re:When does the important stuff arrive? by LWATCDR · · Score: 1

      Well for backups you could try this http://www.bacula.org/en/

      --
      See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
    4. Re:When does the important stuff arrive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      yawn...

      http://www.markround.com/archives/38-ZFS-Replication.html

    5. Re:When does the important stuff arrive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      First I think the OP showed knowledge on pipes when mentioning a ssh tunnel. Second; ufsrestore can do this because it reads the data in a serial manner. But have you ever tried this with zfs? I have, and I also took a look at the temporary stored data. You do not want to do that on a 500Gb slice with user data...

      Sun is really losing its touch here. ZFS can be bend in any shape you want, but when it comes to backups your hands are sort of tied to inflexible solutions.

    6. Re:When does the important stuff arrive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because it would still gobble up temp data?

    7. Re:When does the important stuff arrive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      You do NOT have to restore the entire snapshot..

      say you have a zpool named zed, that automagically mounts at *you guessed it* /zed.

      cd /zed/.zfs/snapshot

      ls

      (see the names of all the snapshots that have been taken)...

      cd into the one that has your file, get to your files location within the snapshot, cp {filename} /zed/path/to/original/file

      there you have it - you've restored the file from the snapshot...

      you can even take snapshots, mount them in other locations, and run netbackup or other 3rd party backup utilities against that point in time...

    8. Re:When does the important stuff arrive? by captbob2002 · · Score: 1

      This is also my issue with ZFS. I've played with it a little but find the available methods for back-up restore to be VERY cumbersome. I am not interested in creating "file systems" for each and every user and trying to manage them all.

      So I too am staying with UFS (and VxFS) for the time being.

    9. Re:When does the important stuff arrive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      one word - star
      aka Schilling's tar

    10. Re:When does the important stuff arrive? by mritunjai · · Score: 1

      And yes: I'm well aware that the ZFS crowd is probably going to get back to "if you need a solid backup you should buy good software" or (IMO even worse:) "whats stopping you from using tar". Thats really missing the whole point here... An enterprise based filesystem, open sourced and all, and it can't even do something as simple which ext2, ext3, xfs and yes; even UFS could do for YEARS?

      Pray tell me how does "ext2, ext3, xfs and even UFS" do backups ? Do they have backup and restore integrated and if yes where was it hidden for all the decade I've been looking for one ?

      Repeat: Backup/Restore is NOT responsibility of the filesystem! You need something like Amanda, which works fine on ZFS/OpenSolaris.

      I think what you really are talking about is a ZFS "aware" backup/restore tool that understands what snapshots and clones are, and doesn't copy things over and over again just because it stumbled on a clone or snapshot.

      Still it is the job of backup tool providers, not the FS developers.

      --
      - mritunjai
    11. Re:When does the important stuff arrive? by axle_512 · · Score: 1

      +1 for parent.

      zfs send and receive are not good to use in enterprise solutions for the reasons stated here:
      http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide#ZFS_Backup_.2F_Restore_Recommendations

      Instead, do what the parent poster said... once you have your snapshot, tar the directory and send it to tape or to your remote system. Need to restore 1 file? No problem. What if part of the snapshot is corrupt? You should still be able to get at most of the data. The whole snap is not lost.

    12. Re:When does the important stuff arrive? by tyen · · Score: 1

      We're planning a migration off of ext3 to zfs for our data, and we use IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for backups, which provides a way to back up and restore individual files using a ZFS snapshot as a reference point. I would imagine other backup software support a similar feature. Is this the kind of external backup support you are talking about, or something more extensive?

    13. Re:When does the important stuff arrive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Because once you need to restore this data (Mr. Doe lost a very important file 2 weeks ago, only noticed it today
      > and needs to be restored ASAP) your only option on ZFS will be to import the whole damned snapshot again.

      Nah.. Watch the TimeSlider demo on the OpenSolaris homepage. Mr. Doe may copy-n-paste single files from his ZFS
      snapshot. This was baked-in before TimeSlider but there was no GUI before.

      By default, ZFS snapshots are automatically mounted as read-only filesystems. So on the command-line Mr. Doe would
      run "df -h" to see his filesystems, and there would be a read-only FS that Mr. Doe could navigate to pick and chose
      which files he wants to restore (just by copying them from the snapshot's read-only FS.)

    14. Re:When does the important stuff arrive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      temp data?

      It is a disk to disk full backup. What do you mean of temp data in the context of backups?

  14. Re:how impoverished a dev environment would you st by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    huh ? please elaborate ? are you saying linux has thousands of ready-to-run exploits

  15. Re:I'm curious by Jack9 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Solaris was considered a "server" OS when their hardware was epic. Now they aren't much better or worse, imo.

    OSX and Solaris both have dtrace, which is a truly invaluable runtime debugging tool.

    OpenSolaris is attempting to take the best ideas from everyone else's desktop initiatives and to implement them similarly or better. Good for them.

    --

    Often wrong but never in doubt.
    I am Jack9.
    Everyone knows me.
  16. Re:I'm curious by David+Gerard · · Score: 1

    Solaris is the Sysadmin's Friend. It does high-end stuff far more robustly than Linux. Desktop, not so much, but they're trying.

    --
    http://rocknerd.co.uk
  17. How does it stack up? by ruphus13 · · Score: 1

    Fedora recently claimed that it would take $10B+ to re-build it from scratch. Given that OpenSolaris came from Solaris/Unix, how much more stable/solid is it, as compared to the Linux kernel? Also, I bet there are more Open Source apps that have yet to be 'ported' to it. No empirical data - just a thought...

    1. Re:How does it stack up? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, that was /dev/random.

    2. Re:How does it stack up? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I use the major stuff (python, perl, GNU Compiler collection (g++,gcc,gfortran), most everything in /usr/sfw, gettext, readline, &c &c.) XFCE 4 runs fine, even on my very old Blade 150. I maintain patches for a few things that we use at our company (major Solaris shop), such as one niggling bug in LuaFileSystem (it's not a bug per se, but it passes incorrect params for two different syscalls on Solaris; the issue is because of LFSs Linux roots...). We also use the Python Image Library, some Ruby, Java, &c &c. I've not run into anything major yet (& Sunfreeware does help). YMMV.

  18. Re:I'm curious by wild_berry · · Score: 1

    I'm curious, too: when is the Year of Solaris on the Desktop?

  19. Re:I'm curious by greg_barton · · Score: 1

    They're including Eclipse! I'm in. :)

  20. Better interface than Time Machine by argent · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Apple's user interfaces are generally... OK, and at least consistent. Time Machine's user interface is bloody awful, useless, and (of course) completely inconsistent with everything else in the system including Dashboard, Spaces, and Expose ... the previous trio of user-interface standards busters that at least seemed to be moving towards a common meta-interface.

    TimeSlider is much better. No big fancy 3d interface, just a slider in a folder you can drag forward and back... without abandoning the desktop. And the way Apple *implements* Time Machine that functionality would be rather easy to implement.

    Oh well. Apple never forgives someone making them look bad, and they never back down on bad UI, so we won't see this in Snow Leopard. :p

    1. Re:Better interface than Time Machine by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Apple's user interfaces are generally... OK, and at least consistent

      I know English is a difficult language, but I believe the correct conjugation you were looking for is 'were'. Since 10.2, Apple's interfaces have been progressively less consistent, and focussed on form more than function. They used to manage good UIs that also looked good, but this hasn't been the case for a while.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    2. Re:Better interface than Time Machine by argent · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I know English is a difficult language, but I believe the correct conjugation you were looking for is 'were'.

      No, I mean "are". And I mean "OK", not "good".

      They used to manage good UIs that also looked good, but this hasn't been the case for a while.

      Apple's UI has never struck me as being particularly good. They're OK. The best thing about them is the consistency... for software you're supposed to use on our desktop, even in their worst UI excesses they have been far more consistent than most. Front Row diverges from the usual UI model, but it's designed for use from the couch on a lower resolution screen. The iPhone UI is different, but self-consistent.

      But this is like they put the Front Row team on the UI, without thinking about whether it made the slightest bit of sense.

    3. Re:Better interface than Time Machine by TheNetAvenger · · Score: 1

      TimeSlider is much better. No big fancy 3d interface, just a slider in a folder you can drag forward and back... without abandoning the desktop. And the way Apple *implements* Time Machine that functionality would be rather easy to implement.

      This is something I completely agree with. Time Machine is more of a marketing 'application' than either a good technology or an interface to the technology. Why Apple thought they needed a cumbersome Application just to have access to backed up data is rather insane.

      The over the top nature of Time Machine is why 'Previous Versions' from Vista has often been so overlooked. Vista does both the OpenSolaris and OS X backup technologies with previous versions, but because the UI is rather simple and a right click to get to in a folder, most people never even know it is there, and even many Tech Journalists to this day give you a blank stare as they have no idea it exists.

      OpenSolaris's UI of this technology is where someone got a UI mostly right, as it has the simpliest of implementation, is in your face so you know the feature exists, yet isn't a Frankenstein application that takes the user away from the folder.

      A side note, people should be careful to not 'technically' compare OS X's Time Machine with the OpenSolaris Time Slider feature, as 'Time Machine' is built on external hourly backups, it is not a volume level recovery ability like like 'Time Slider'.

      The 'Time Slider' feature in OpenSolaris should be compared to Vista 'Previous Versions', as they are technically doing the same thing with regard to the FS technologies. (NTFS and ZFS have copy on write functionality and this is why Windows 2003 Server and Vista also have the ability to view folders from a previous time on the same volume.)

      Vista's 'Previous Versions' also adds backup data to the list, so it not only gives you what is available on the volume like 'OpenSolaris', but also gives you all the folder/files previous versions that exist in backups known like OS X does.

      I do like the OpenSolaris ease of adding this interface to the technology ZFS offers.

      'Previous Versions' in Vista is ok, as it presents a list and you can open the folder from any previous time in the list and drag stuff out of it or restore it rather seamlessly, but having the interface in the folder view itself is brilliant, and one less folder view open, so kudos to the Solaris team.

      This is the type of User level UI stuff that can beat MS; however, good luck in beating Apple's marketing.

    4. Re:Better interface than Time Machine by larry+bagina · · Score: 1

      time machine isn't just finder. Applications can support it too. If you open time machine while running Address Book, you can browse and restore previous contact information.

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    5. Re:Better interface than Time Machine by argent · · Score: 1

      That still doesn't excuse the horrible user interface.

    6. Re:Better interface than Time Machine by TheNetAvenger · · Score: 1

      time machine isn't just finder. Applications can support it too. If you open time machine while running Address Book, you can browse and restore previous contact information

      Neither is 'Previous Versions' in Vista...

      However, for looking at 'folders' the OpenSolaris interface and the 'Previous Versions' interface of Vista are both superior to Time Machine, in addition to be technically superior as they have FS level support for on the HD tracking of changes to the files in real-time, no backups needed, but backups are also used on Vista just like TIme Machine.

      The Application level APIs for the 'Previous Versions' features in Vista make Time Machine look like a free backup utility, so your assumptions that because it extends beyond finder is somehow unique is something I found astounding.

      And this doesn't even touch the inherent features that older applications get via the OS dialogs, so inside a 1995 Win95 application, you can right click and ask for previous versions of the files inside the application.

      Apple Marketing really did a number on people to make such a mundane and 'done' feature seem like the next generation of something, especially 4 years after people were using it in the Windows world. (Yes Windows 2003 Server and via it XP had the ability to use previous versions as well.)

      Vista just added client side support of the feature and added backups to the list of versions in the timeline. MS didn't think it was something to scream from the rooftops because it was already so 'overdone' in the Windows world and a basic feature.

      In fact it wasn't until the Apple marketing machine turned TimeMachine into something it isn't, and *nix users getting a taste of a solid FS like ZFS that FINALLY competes with NTFS in performance and features, that you see people running to use these 'wonderful' technologies that Windows users didn't realize how 'special' they apparently were since they have been using them for so many years.

      Apple doesn't even have a solid FS technology to do 'copy on write'. This is why TimeMachine makes you backup every hour to get the 'versions' and if you are editing multi-GB videos or projects, this turns into a horrid performance issue. As the backup can't even do full bit/byte level differential backups, and Vista's backup system even does this, as well as being media agnostic, from a DVDR to a network location to a USB drive.

      I get so tired of the Apple fan crap that have no idea how featureless and dated their OS is when it comes to core technologies.

      Even as 'basic' as OpenSolaris is compared to a mature Linux installation, it at least has ZFS and all the technologies that this type of FS allows. From document and file level Time Slider features to volume and OS level restore points.

      And sadly the *nix world had to wait for ZFS to come from a closed vendor to be the first FS that has most of the features of NTFS and seamlessly provide them at a performance level of NTFS.

      Make fun of MS, Windows, Win32, even poke at NT if you want, but NTFS is something MS did well with, and it has been the holy-grail of FS technologies that the OSS and *nix world has been trying to catch up to for over 15 years now.

      And Apple OS X? Oh my, fanbois, your OS is so far behind it is somewhat scary, as it will force Apple to do another 300 feature list and again resort to lising things like 'New Airport Menu' as a new feature for the freaking OS. As for technology in OS X, Apple is already hit the ropes of the kernel and GUI designs and are either patching like mad or if they are smart considering a new architecture and strapping another new GUI on it.

    7. Re:Better interface than Time Machine by argent · · Score: 1

      "a solid FS like ZFS that FINALLY competes with NTFS in performance and features"

      It's a pity that NTFS still doesn't compete with UFS for stability and reliability. Vista STILL has to defragment the damn thing. Oh, it's got lots of bells and whistles, but the main advantage of bells-and-whistles file systems is application lock-in... and that's an advantage for the vendor, not the customer. That's part of the VMS legacy in NT, and not something to be proud of.

      Speaking of bells and whistles, it's a pity that Apple uses that funky HFS+ and implements features at the file system level instead of the vnode level... which would make things like spotlight file-system agnostic.

    8. Re:Better interface than Time Machine by TheNetAvenger · · Score: 1

      It's a pity that NTFS still doesn't compete with UFS for stability and reliability. Vista STILL has to defragment the damn thing

      Fragment, gasp, you mean just like ZFS?

      This is a 'mild' direct side effect of the 'copy on write' feature of the FS and ALL FS technologies that have true 'copy on write' abilities.

      Go look it up...

      Even FSs without 'copy of write' features become fragmented.(Like the newest UFS incarnations and HFS+) It is impossilbe for a FS to remain completely unfragmented without sacrificing massive upfront performance.

      Using UFS as a 'pilar' of a FS that doesn't fragment is very, very wrong, as it might be argued that it won't fragment as much as ZFS or NTFS, because of no 'copy on write' features, the FS itself has heavy performance issues because of the lookup methods it uses and has always been a controversial FS due to managing block thrashing from the lookup index.

      The key in dealing with fragmentation is in the lookup times associated with fragmentation, and on NTFS, even a massively fragmented file will still outpeform a contiguous file on other FS technologies because of how the original index of NTFS handles block allocation and can swipe the file segments in one pass without additional lookups.

      The second key to figting fragmentation is a system level utility to check for performance impacting fragmentation and defragmenting during user idle time, something Vista does quite well, and even XP does on essential system files like the registry, etc.

      Even OS X finally added a background defragmentation utility because even though UFS and HFS+ don't support 'copy on write' THEY STILL FRAGMENT, hence the need for a background defrag utility, just ike NT or ANY modern OS. (Try editing several multi GB video files and if you don't end up with fragmentation on any FS, you are lying, unless the FS disposes of all up front performance and rewrites the entire file to keep it contiguous.

      That's part of the VMS legacy in NT, and not something to be proud of.

      If you think NTFS has ANY legacy to VMS you have no idea what you are talking about. It has more heritage to HPFS from OS/2 1.x, but was re-written for NT and was a new FS technology.

      NTFS was designed to be full featured and dynamically extensible, that is how MS has been able to easily add features to NTFS without recreating the basic FS core nor degrading performance. File system level compression - added. File system level encryption - added. Etc...

      it's a pity that Apple uses that funky HFS+ and implements features at the file system level instead of the vnode level... which would make things like spotlight file-system agnostic

      Ok, this is not technically accurate, but even if we accept your terminology as accurate it is irrelevant because Vista and XPs Desktop search is completely FS agnostic, so your point here has no validity.

      (Early betas of Vista used NTFS metatagging, but this was removed because file tagging could be used 'in file' with added Desktop Search index tagging. This avoids the lost NTFS metadata when people ZIP or email files, and by using file type tagging support it avoids the horrors of appending resource forks to files/documents.)

      You should do a bit more FS research than Wiki fact referencing, as there is a key differece between having 'facts' and understanding what they mean and their implications.

    9. Re:Better interface than Time Machine by argent · · Score: 1

      This is a 'mild' direct side effect of the 'copy on write' feature of the FS and ALL FS technologies that have true 'copy on write' abilities.

      Even if you don't use this feature you still have significant fragmentation problems on NTFS.

      And there's all kinds of situations where you don't want to use snapshots and versioning.

      Like file-level caches, such as Internet Explorer and other browsers on Windows use extensively, and which turn into huge fragmentation sources on NTFS.

      UFS doesn't need frequent defragmenting. Yes, some fragmentation will occur, but it's a minor problem, one you don't have to take special care to recover from. A multi-gigabyte file in half a dozen fragments is not a file that needs to be defragmented... even the NT defragmentation tool won't call for defragmentation in that case. Calling it a "mild side effect" on Windows, when it's always been a common problem for virtually all users, when even moderate sized files commonly end up in scores of fragments, when Vista has one of its innumerable daemons doing nothing but background defragmenting, is pure spin control.

  21. Sun must have some massive servers by prestomation · · Score: 1

    I was looking for a torrent, figuring that the servers would be dead.

    I'm pulling 2.5Mb/sec right now

    Nevermind...it's done.

    1. Re:Sun must have some massive servers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      One cannot help loving Slashdot humor.
      You are so mean to the poor Solaris developers.

    2. Re:Sun must have some massive servers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's Sun. Of course they have good servers (and bandwidth).

    3. Re:Sun must have some massive servers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They buy their servers from Dell.

  22. Re:OpenFrosty Piss Released by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    [citation needed]

  23. Re:I'm curious by larry+bagina · · Score: 1

    Sun's X client has display postscript support.

    --
    Do you even lift?

    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  24. Re:Opensolaris guide for Linux users' by larry+bagina · · Score: 1

    [original research]

    --
    Do you even lift?

    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  25. Re:This soft ware hase buges by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    OMGZ that is osoop0oooo funny!!!111!

    M$M$M$M$M$$M$

    Now Im funny tooo

  26. Re:I'm curious by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

    I think you mean X server, not client, and last time I checked only Solaris Express came with XDPS support - OpenSolaris didn't (a shame, but not even GNUstep uses it anymore, so probably won't be missed by anyone who doesn't have old OpenStep programs from Solaris 7).

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  27. Re:I'm curious by Haeleth · · Score: 1

    2006, for me, since I've been using a Solaris desktop daily since then. A real one, with a SPARC inside and all. It's not as bad as you might think. I even switched from Gnome to Xfce at home once I discovered how much better CDE's 2D desktop-oriented design is compared to the inefficient 1D task-bar-oriented design that Gnome and KDE inexplicably copy from Windows.

    (Shame that Sun's deprecated CDE and chosen Gnome to replace it. Restricting main menu access to a corner of the screen, and minimised windows to a line along the edge of the screen, just seems silly once you've experienced the alternative.)

  28. Re:I'm curious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Really, which X client?

  29. Re:I'm curious by Haeleth · · Score: 1

    Sun's X client has display postscript support.

    Indeed it does, but does OpenSolaris include Xsun? I thought it only included the Xorg server, which is exactly the same on OpenSolaris as it is on GNU/Linux or any other platform.

  30. Re:I'm curious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It was a useless extension anyway, and the wrong way to do it. Bang on Sun to release NeWS on OpenSolaris so the community can update it into something X11 can't even conceive of. . .

  31. Re:how impoverished a dev environment would you st by museumpeace · · Score: 1

    no, certainly not...I meant windows of course but should have said so....just see the earlier /. article today on the MS WordPad exploit that DID NOT get fixed by last nights MS patch push.

    --
    SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
  32. Nice version name by Yvan256 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Version 2008.11

    How could it be any simpler? It's the november 2008 version.

    No "Vista", "Leopard" or "Feisty Fawn" (geeze, wtf is that one).

    Congratulations on using a version number that anyone can understand.

    1. Re:Nice version name by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Version 2008.11

      How could it be any simpler? It's the november 2008 version.

      No "Vista", "Leopard" or "Feisty Fawn" (geeze, wtf is that one).

      Congratulations on using a version number that anyone can understand.

      This is Sun Microsystems we're talking about.

      Rest assured, the demise of any understandable paradigm is merely a reorg away from eternal oblivion.

    2. Re:Nice version name by paziek · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Ubuntu is actually using version naming like:
      08.10
      with means 2008 year, 10 month
      08.04
      with means 2008 year, 4 month
      Intrepid Ibex/Hardy Heron is just.. for people that find it easier to remember those that way?

    3. Re:Nice version name by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Feisty Fawn" (geeze, wtf is that one)

      you mean ubuntu 7.04? yeah i hate the ubuntu alliterated naming scheme as well, thats why i consistently use the version number which ubuntu also uses. Which works the same as the current solaris scheme, 7.04 was released in april 2007

      i love these timestamp style version numbers, makes it easy to remember how old your install/computer is :)

    4. Re:Nice version name by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Umm, lol. You'll find that's just a coincidence.

      Solaris is currently 5.10 (Solaris 10. SUN will take this version of OpenSolaris and it will become 5.11, aka. Solaris 11.

    5. Re:Nice version name by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you had cared to pay attention Ubuntu using the same versioning system, but they also attach the crappy animal names.

    6. Re:Nice version name by FunkyELF · · Score: 1

      Yeah, Sun has been known to do it before. Went from Java 1.4 to Java 5 but it still had 1.5 all over the place. Same with 1.6 / 6.
      Can't be as bad as Python though. Went from 2.6 to 3000.

    7. Re:Nice version name by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ubuntu 8.04
      Ubuntu 8.10
      Ubuntu 9.04

      Any more simple than that? Feisty Fawn, Sleazy Snake ... those are all just cute version names. The numbering scheme is what's important

    8. Re:Nice version name by logixoul · · Score: 1

      In my office we use Ubuntu 8.04, 6.10 and 6.04. I can't for the life of me tell you the names of those, and I regularly stumble when looking for packages etc. And I'm a geek...

    9. Re:Nice version name by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Feisty Fawn, as in, Feisty Fawn 7.04?

      2007, month 4.

  33. Re:Opensolaris guide for Linux users' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    barack fucking christ! Why the hell would someone inject a fucking liter of saline into their ball sack? My god that is fucked up! You FOSS users are nuts. No wonder apple and Microsoft are kicking your ass. You're too busy INJECTING SALINE into your balls!

  34. OS Flame Wars? by pseudonomous · · Score: 1

    Is it just me, or are the majority of the comments over on the Ars Technica article (and yes, some here too) just kind of stupid? What annoys me the most is Linux users complainng: "Why aren't you working on our projects instead of doing your own thing?" I think people are missing some important, basic facts:

    1) Sun doesn't have an interest in promoting linux, to some degree they have an interest in supporting open source projects portable to any unix-like OS, but not in particular Linux. Linux in fact competes agianst products that Sun sells (support for Solaris, that is). Yes, Sun sells workstations and servers that can run Linux, but these same workstations can also run Windows or *BSD, so there's no special relationship between Sun's hardware and linux. Sun may support some OSS projects, but they're a business, their job is to make money.

    2) Choice to work on whatever you feel like and share that work is what has produced Linux as it is today, Linux is not just about beating out Microsoft, it's about designing a good operating system. Other people want to do the same thing but in a different way, or starting from different building blocks and there's no good reason why they shouldn't.

    Related to this:

    3) Just becuase a developer is porting a bunch of hardware to Open Solaris, it doesn't mean if the OS didn't exist (s)he would be working for your favorite Linux distro. That is work done Solaris != work not being done on Linux.

    4) NIH isn't always bad, if everybody thought, well "386-BSD already is a decent OS so let's work on that" Linux wouldn't even exist (More acurately, I guess, "if Linus Torvalds had thought DOS and Minix were good enough, Linux wouldn't exist"). If people had thought AT&T's first distributions of Unix were good enough, we wouldn't have had BSD. And if Thompson and Ritchie had thought Multics was good enough Unix wouldn't exist.

    I mean, I don't really care that much about Sun/Solaris, I can't afford their hardware and I've already got an OS I'm happy with. But I wish nothing but the best to the developers working on OpenSolaris. And if you really think Linux distro (x) needs more developers to work on project (y), guess who could be spending less time whining and more time working on project (y).

    1. Re:OS Flame Wars? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Chill man, the Ubuntu bois get their panties in a knot pretty easily. After a while it's not even decent sport workin' them. As for the stupid comments on Slashdot, I feel pretty lucky if they're less than 75% of the total.

      I rather like Solaris because it's different enough from BSD to make me stop and think. It's a great OS and I hope Sun pulls out of their funk because competition is always good. And it might save us from everything becoming GNU-Gnome-Linux. (Well, except for you Pat. You still the man.) If only McNeeley had been forced out five or seven years earlier...

    2. Re:OS Flame Wars? by XDirtypunkX · · Score: 1

      Sun's job is to make money? Quick! Someone tell Sun!

    3. Re:OS Flame Wars? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Bois is french for timber. is that what you meant?

  35. I find it slower than Linux on *my* PC by paziek · · Score: 0

    On my Athlon XP 2500+, 512 MiB RAM, Radeon 9200 SE
    Ubuntu was faster.
    OSolaris was booting for.. like ages. I was wondering if I didn't install some Mojave on my PC or whatever.
    Then, applications were launching slow as well. Like 2x slower than on Ubuntu. And from time to time I experienced some hiccups. But usually after launch - apps were performing more or less like on Ubuntu.

    There was also this issue with my keyboard setup, it was using some ancient polish layout, used like.. back in Win98 or sth like that. Had to google a fix for that. But thats fine, its a fresh system, so shit happens.

    Flash - while on Ubuntu finally it stopped crashing, on OSolaris it wasn't crashing my browser, but making it hog all resources and practically making whole system unusable.

    Last thing - I couldn't enable Compiz, while on Ubuntu it was enabled by default and after some time I had do disable it, cause I got bored with it - on OSolaris I couldn't enable it at all. I guess I wasn't lucky enough to have Nvidia card, that had its driver installed by default, regardless it detected my card before installing as Radeon 9200 SE.

    Still, I must admit, that network stack for utility apps was nice, more useful that those I found on Ubuntu.

    It was like 2 weeks ago, it was still RC2 so perhaps this was fixed by now. Maybe in a year it will get decent, but by then on Linux we should have some alternative to ZFS, so basically OSolaris won't have this advantage anymore.

  36. One day experience by realwhz · · Score: 1

    I have just installed it on an old PC (2.8G CPU and 512M mem) yesterday. The installation procedure is easy and smooth. And the hardwares are well supported except the network card, a marvell yukon 88E8001 card. Fortunately, the device driver utility provided by the livecd succesfully detected it and pointed out where the 3rd part driver can be obtained. The driver's installation script, however, has some problems. As a result, I still have to manually run update_drv with correct paramter after installation to attach the driver. Anyway, the system successfully runs finally. With Gnome interface, the operations are easy and familiar.

  37. Desktop vs Server? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What, specifically, makes OpenSolaris a "desktop" OS? I would like to think that I could run OpenSolaris on commodity servers (e.g. Dell) just like I run Linux now. However, all of the articles I read continue to refer to OpenSolaris as Sun's "desktop" version of Solaris. Are there built-in tuning limitations? Is it simply considered less tested than Solaris, a la Fedora vs. RHEL? Is this just marketing to encourage the use of the commercial version for data center deployments? I'm very interested in what Sun's doing here, but I'd like to understand the Solaris/OpenSolaris distinctions better.

  38. Re:I'm curious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... because "flex" is as old as "lex"? You're a clueless tw@.

  39. Re:I'm curious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Comstar?!

    It is awesome. It can turn an entire server into a Fibre Channel or iSCSI target.

    So you have a thumper with 48 drives, you create a zfs pool on that for RAID redundancy, then create a zvol of nearly the entire size.

    Then you use COMSTAR to export that zvol as a Fibre Channel or iSCSI target.

    Then on another server you use that iSCSI/Fibre Channel target as a 'drive' and create a ZFS system on top of it.

    You can stripe multiple thumpers (or whatever) together with a front end system (using ZFS of course) since the back end is handling the RAID.

    As you need more space, add another thumper to the stripe.

    Or you could mirror them. Whatever.

  40. ZFS + iscsi by scsizor · · Score: 1

    I hope u arn't still using iscsi cus it dont work!