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: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

[Anthony_Cargile]

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 ;).

When does the important stuff arrive?

[Anonymous Coward]

(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!