OpenSolaris 2008.11 Released, Reviewed

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."

Comments

Mostly Positive

[javacowboy]

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.

Re:Mostly Positive

[armanox]

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

Re:I'm curious

[javacowboy]

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

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

Re:I'm curious

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I'm curious

[Jack9]

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.

Re:Better interface than Time Machine

[TheRaven64]

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.