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Oracle Solaris 11 Express Released
comay writes "Today Oracle released Solaris 11 Express 2010.11. It includes a large number of new features (PDF) not found in either Oracle Solaris 10 or previous OpenSolaris releases, including ZFS encryption and deduplication, network-based packaging and provisioning systems, network virtualization, optimized I/O for NUMA platforms and optimized platform support including support for Intel's latest Nehalem and SPARC T3. In addition, Oracle Solaris 10 support is available from within a container/zone so migration of existing systems is greatly simplified."
Reader gtirloni adds, "Oracle also announced that this is not a beta or preview, but a full, supported release aimed at everybody developing, testing, prototyping or demonstrating applications running on the latest Solaris release (not allowed to be used in production)."
Wasn't Oracle going to kill all good stuff from Sun according to the slashdot hivemind?
Thanks, Larry. Unfortunately, we're up to our ears in new hardware running virtual instances of Solaris 8 and 9 still. Imagine all that wonderful new crap we could do with Solaris 11? Like hosting Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 forever... Please do something useful like not being a giant IT asshole. Thanks!
Oh, and great work on Java and OpenOffice! Way to drive off any good developers. Guess you'll need to raise your prices even more to pay for angry junior software engineers to replace freely available, superior talent. Weren't you going to ride a balloon to the sun, or was that Beardy Branson? I get you two confused.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
Yes
So, it's a "Full, Supported Release", but we can't use it for anything except as a development platform (and what to deploy on?). From the license agreement: We can't "use the Programs for your own internal business purposes... or for any commercial or production purposes" So in reality, it's just a way to show off, an try to keep people from jumping ship to linux. It's definitely the antithesis of FOSS -- nothing is free about it.
I am sitting here trying to take a short break from fighting with MySQL on Solaris, and I find that Oracle has released Solaris 11, with Encrypted ZFS, something that I have needed for over a year. I think I will get out my bow, and hunt down Larry, he must pay. Or maybe I will just install Linux on this box and be happy.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
This is only allowed to be used in dev. They killed Open Solaris. It certainly seems like they are killing a good part of the *free* stuff from Sun to me.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Yes, you can't use the free download version for any production use. It's really annoying, and severely limits the usefulness of S11 Express.
However, note that if you have an Oracle Premium Support contract (all Oracle Support is Premium ;-), then you have an entitlement to use S11 Express in a production environment, and receive normal support for it, just like you have an RTU and Support for Oracle Linux and Oracle Solaris 10 via the same contract.
This is just an FYI - I'm not commenting on the utility or "goodness" of S11Express.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
It seems you actually CAN request a support contract for Solaris 11 Express. The issue seems to be that the download from the Oracle Technology Network alone doesn't give you that hability (to use in production). It looks like they should have paid more attention to the wording... the download from OTN shouldn't be used in production but if you want support to use it in production, contact Oracle. This has been pointed out to many people, perhaps they will make that more explicity. The download page also mentions it's a "full supported release".
none
I'm glad to see some positive news coming from Oracle. Solaris is a great OS and I'm thankful that I can keep using it for free on my servers at home.
Now if we could also get full ZFS support for Linux, that would be great.
No. BrandZ is dead, and support for it has been removed, in favor of VirtualBox as the preferred method of supporting Linux-on-Solaris.
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Solaris 11 Express is aimed at people that want to preview the features that will come in full production mode in Solaris 11. But they are also offering support for the Express edition today (the license terms are kind of cryptic, as always). I can't see how Oracle is killing Solaris no matter how hard I try to imagine that.
none
Wake me when these features are available in OpenIndiana and Nexenta Core. I'll not be trapped investing more time in platforms where ``I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.''
First there's Red Hat's "Linux by the pound" announcement and then this humdinger. I'm ready to learn .NET.
Sadly, I'm only half joking....
How come when an Oracle story gets posted these days, I think of Karl Popper's work . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
BrandZ never supported newer than CentOS 3.8 because it emulated Linux 2.4 kernel. It was killed and put in the attic before the Oracle takeover. Also the emulation was never good enough to run apache. I don't think it was ever used very much except internally to run 'acroread', but Sun sure did flog it to death at every users group marketing event. Half of the Solaris 10 Promises they actually did fully, usefully deliver, albeit a couple years late, but BrandZ wasn't one of them.
I would say Xen is a better way to run Linux than VirtualBox. There's a lot of work in OpenSolaris on polishing Xen, though unfortunately, (1) Xen isn't in OpenIndiana, and (2) you can't run VirtualBox and Xen at the same time. :)
There's stuff in Solaris that doesn't get nearly enough credit though, like Crossbow 10gig NIC acceleration similar to RPS & RFS in Linux, Infiniband support and NFS-RDMA transport, 'eventports' (an Nginx-friendly feature similar to epoll and kqueue), and the integration between the ipkg package system and ZFS, and mdb (everyone talks about dtrace, but no one about mdb). Then there's stuff that just shockingly sucks, like JDS and ipfilter and the permanent lack of a Chromium port.
Sometimes ACs need to be taken seriously. Very seriously.
I was considering your post as one of this class, until I hit
OpenOffice.org [...] still has compatibility issues
That kind of kills your post, since an intentionally closed, unpublished, proprietary, format that alas made it as de-facto standard can hardly be expected to be met 100%. Were it published, and nobody from StarOffice through SUN and now Oracle could have written a 100% compatible clone, I might have modded you up.
You may not:
- use the Programs for your own internal business purposes (other than developing, testing, prototyping and demonstrating your applications) or for any commercial or production purposes;
- remove or modify any program markings or any notice of our proprietary rights;
- make the Programs available in any manner to any third party;
- use the Programs to provide third-party training;
- assign this agreement or give or transfer the Programs or an interest in them to another individual or entity;
- cause or permit reverse engineering (unless required by law for interoperability), disassembly or decompilation of the Programs;
- disclose results of any benchmark test results related to the Programs without our prior consen
So if you work for an organisation that has been drinking the VMWare Koolaid and wants to virtualize everything from their servers to their dekstops to their network firewalls/appliances how does Solaris x86 play under ESX?
The old advantage of the IBMs and the Oracles of "it is our software, our OS running on our hardware supported by our services business" is being eroded a bit by the desire to drop anything and everything into the same ESX farm...
Solaris had it's shot at being something the Slashdot crowd could pick up and run with, but given that you can't use Solaris for anything useful now I'm not sure how this qualifies as news. Solaris is now a very high-end OS that's as relevant to people as AIX is, because that's the only feasible place it can survive now.
They're just giving away the development tools for free. So when/if developers use them, and end users like the result, they've got you by the short and curlies. It's a time honoured tradition, often rightly or wrongly compared to a drug dealer's "the first hit is free, kid".
Another way of looking at it:
Prospective customer is already a Solaris (or Oracle DB, etc.) shop, and wants a project based on this platform. If the development tools cost a fortune, you might pass up the business.
That still doesn't excuse Oracle for its shabby treatment of the OpenSolaris community - though Sun was partly to blame with its half-hearted opening of Solaris to begin with. Illumos will be nice to have, but it's going to be a while before they replace the closed code with open code.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
They don't have 2.6 support?
/etc/redhat-release
[root@brandz ~]# uname -apm
Linux brandz 2.6.18 BrandZ fake linux i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
[root@brandz ~]# cat
CentOS release 5.5 (Final)
[root@brandz ~]#
OK I'll bite.
Personally I agree with AC on Netbeans... it is a pile of crap. Eclipse is nice enough and I agree C# is a much neater language for application development but Java does have it's place and not going away anytime soon (just no more Java in SAP please).
MySQL is crap if you are trying to run big databases that usually run on Oracle, DB2. Otherwise it's fine for its intended purpose. Personally I would switch to Postgres as I still worry of MySQL's future.
OpenOffice is bloated but it is supposed to be. It's feature rich and designed to be an alternative to the 800lb Gorilla known as Microsoft Office, personally I find that to be the true star of the Sun software suite. Compatibility has not been an issue with me for a long time except VB macros (which need to die badly)
Make SELinux enforcing again!
OpenOffice is bloated but it is supposed to be. It's feature rich and designed to be an alternative to the 800lb Gorilla known as Microsoft Office,
The problem isn't that it's bloated. The problem is that it's *more* bloated than Microsoft Office, and has fewer features.
Comment of the year
I wonder if ZFS will continue to be released to be used in FreeBSD.
Yes -- http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2010-August/009197.html
brandelf -t FreeBSD
I lost touch with Sun microprocessor development since I left my life as an IT/Unix specialist behind me, a couple of years ago. I am pleasantly surprised to learn that Sun engineers have been working at it, though, and have produced a rather intriguing architecture with 16 cores and 8 HW threads per core. That's pretty fucking impressive, methinks, especially since it seems to integrate two 1/10 GB ethernet controllers on die, and the 4 DDR3 channels are not bad to have, either. Anyhow, I think this is the most exciting CPU, for me, of recent years.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
There's a wonderfully simple solution to this. Time to move off them expensive SPARC boxes...
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Not anymore, they finally created this:
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/solaris/non-sun-x86-081976.html
Oracle has over 300,000 customers of it's products. Sun had 30,000. I think the future looks bright for commercial Solaris. At the end of the day someone has to pay for the R&D that leads to innovation and Oracle knows how to sell software and make money. It's called capitalism and it's what pays everyone's salaries. And it's because of this that we will see more innovations like ZFS and DTrace.
This is a good thing as competition always benefits everyone including open source.
I'm disappointed that there's been almost no activity out of OpenIndiana's web site (http://openindiana.org/latest-news/). It was supposed to be the next-best thing to an official open-source fork, but for whatever reason it's been dead since its release...
Just beware -- Don't make the mistake of putting this in production. The "Express" version of Oracle is not taken seriously by Oracle support - There are no Oracle support bulletins for Express versions of the RDBMS - it's just off their radar. If you have an issue, and you will, you are on your own...
This post is extremely dishonest. If you've actually installed enough to get that output, that necessarily means you already realize (1) you installed from some experimental .tar.gz file with all kinds of undocumented tampering, meant for development, not from the actual release .iso the way the 2.4 'lx' brand installs, so 'cat /etc/redhat-release' doesn't actually mean the installer ran up to that point which is something it would imply to any reasonable individual. In fact the GNU tar that extracted that .tar.gz was probably the solaris one, not even Linux tar.
And (2) it's so broken that basic programs like 'rm' don't run! That page says, b131 was the first one with enough basic syscalls for 'rm' to work. and lx brand was moved to the attic in b143 (search for EOF lx brand).
This field is full of overwhelming arcania, and without the good faith effort of people like yourself we'll make bad decisions and garble our own history. Please don't spew out deliberately misleading teasers just for the contrary LULZ of it.
Yeah, that bugs me too. It's the [lack of] performance that bugs me the most.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
They already do. That's the problem.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Yep, quotes from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/08/sun_bonuses_ibm/ :
"However, IBM operates in the real world of profit and loss, and sources told The Reg categorically that IBM failed to get a satisfactory answer on which, if any, of Sun's software makes money."
"Only if Sun accepts the full facts, and quits playing the kind of Silicon Valley game that has given Web 2.0 services like Digg ridiculous assumed valuations based on nothing more than number or users and potential future revenues can Sun's own future resume in earnest, with IBM."
I'm curious about all of the NetBeans hate. NetBeans ships with:
- A standard Ant- or Maven-based build system with stellar support for both
- All kinds of VCS integration (CVS, SVN, Mercurial)
- Plugins for Jira, Bugzilla, and other ticketing systems
- Support for every major app server
- Very decent XML/schema editor with auto-complete and recognition of tags in context-sensitive help
- An incredibly powerful formatting and styling engine
- Has an integrated database query tool with SQL syntax highlighting
- Ctrl+o to quick-search any type in any project you have open (ctrl+shift+o for any file, period) with recognition for acronyms/camel case abbreviations
- Excellent integration wtih JUnit
- SVN revision highlighting with mouse-over diff and undo/revert (change by change)
- Incredible diff and conflict resolution interface
- WYSIWYG JSF editor
- JSF tag auto-complete (even with Seam and other third-party taglibs)
- A full-featured profiler with the ability to take snapshots the entire runtime
- JavaDoc validation and auto-complete
- Project groups so you don't have to close and re-open your IDE to switch "workspaces"
- Language support for Ruby, C++, PHP, and scripting languages (JavaScript, Groovy)
I can appreciate that there is a group of developers that prefer to use lightweight editors and command-line tools, and that's fine. But if you like big honkin' IDEs then NetBeans is a worthy platform, and I've found it to be a huge time saver.
During installation on a V100 it requested the date and would only accept year values 1900-1999.
Oddly, after reboot it's now displaying the proper date.
How long until the ZFS features are ported to BSD? THAT is something I'd be seriously interested in, since I run a production environment on a tight budget and thus cannot use this version of Solaris.
So Oracle lets you taste their OS for free but do not allow you to directly make money out of it. They do however allow you to develop stuff for a customer running Solaris and to make money that way. I don't see any problem whatsoever with this. Sure they may have killed OpenSolaris which they probably owned largely.
Whaddya want for nothin? Rubber biscuit?
I myself quit OpenSolaris long ago as the buggy menu-driven admin-tools drove me mad and config file specification were either virtually illegible or incomplete.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I can't speak for the other products but yes, this new release is fully supported by Oracle. You can find details on the support offerings that cover both Sun/Oracle hardware and third-party hardware here. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/overview/index.html
Yes, yes they did.
And if you follow your link, then the link to "1-4" sockets, you'll be taken to the page where you can purchase "Oracle Solaris Premier Subscription for Non-Oracle Hardware (1-4 socket server)"
It's ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS......PER YEAR.
"When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
Even if it is "free" for personal use, beware. Unless you have an Oracle support contract, you are out of luck if you encounter problems. I'm not sure if outsiders can even file a bug report now, much less get an actual fix in a timely manner.
Gone are the days of helpful people on Sun's mailing lists who could supply a quick source fix when things go awry. This was a common occurrence on zfs-discuss, and now you will have no recourse whatsoever.
Solaris Express is a development release, and without the source, you are at the mercy of Oracle, regardless of how much you pay. That is not a good place to be...
The story says that it is "not allowed to be used in production". That is not correct. Instead, it works like this (from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/overview/faqs-oraclesolaris11express-185609.pdf):
* If you want to use it in production, you need to purchase support (for example "Oracle Solaris Premier Subscription for non-Oracle hardware")
* If you don't buy the support contract, you can use it for evaluation and development
Pay for production use, free for other use.
I use Eclipse everyday and there is no doubt it is more powerful. But it's also a bitch to get it working properly with Maven, Subversion and other things. It requiresplugins, and even messing around with JVM settings in eclipse.ini in the case of m2eclipse. While Netbeans has it's own areas of crapiness, there is no doubt that out of the box it is a more get up and go than Eclipse. It also has a decent form editor for Swing which actually works properly.
OpenOffice is bloated but it is supposed to be.
Much of the bloat is uncessary. For example OpenOffice drags in chunks of Mozilla/NSPR to supply LDAP functionality. It can drag in 2, 3 or 4 different scripting runtimes with their own heap / GC overheads. There is a lot could be done to improve it's bloat without significantly impacting on its functionality just by rationalizing some of this stuff. For example, make one scripting language core, and the other's optional.
I honestly tried, I downloaded the thing, installed it, I was looking for something to help out with building GUIs automagically, heard that NetBeans 'has it'.
I used to work with Eclipse, Visual Age before and Visual Cafe, some other stuff long ago, like Visual Studio.
Opened NetBeans and after about an hour gave up, it has a project model that I am not familiar with and I do not want to spend time to learn it. It's different in the way it handles projects and that was the show stopper. That's too bad, maybe it had what I needed, but whatever I used something else I found for Eclipse.
You can't handle the truth.
MySQL is crap if you are trying to run big databases that usually run on Oracle, DB2. Otherwise it's fine for its intended purpose. Personally I would switch to Postgres as I still worry of MySQL's future.
Funny. I'd switch to Postgres because I worry about data integrity. Who cares what MySQL's future looks like?
I want my Cowboyneal
The most frustrating thing about responses like this is that NetBeans has no project model. NetBeans uses plain files and directories with the most common/default path structure appropriate for the selected build tool (Ant or Maven). If you have a Maven project, then you have a pom.xml in the project root; a src folder (with src/main/java, src/main/resources, src/test/java, src/test/resources, and src/main/web if it's a web application); and a target folder. If you're using Ant (the default) then you have src/java, build, and target (I think; I haven't used Ant in ages).
NetBeans is smart enough to know (just by looking for a build.xml or pom.xml in the project root) what build system you are using and display appropriate shortcut nodes in the project view. src/main/java becomes "Source Packages"; src/test/java becomes "Test Packages"; src/main/resources becomes "Other Sources"; src/test/resources becomes "Other Test Sources"; and src/main/web becomes "Web Pages". And if you don't like that, there's always the "File" view which shows you the raw directory layout (the tab immediately to the right of "Project").
Why is this frustrating? Because Eclipse does not use any kind of standard model. It has its own proprietary (hidden) IDE-specific artifacts without which it will not work *at all* (.classpath). The user has to go out of his way to use Ant or Maven (by installing and configuring plugins). And even in doing so, Eclipse still uses its incremental build *as well*. Eclipse is not able to automatically glean classpath info for it's internal incremental build system from the build tool artifacts (build.xml/pom.xml) despite that fact that all of the information is contained there, which means you have redundant (and potentially out of sync) classpath info in your project. And .classpath is usually excluded from source tools (as it references workspace-specific environment info or canonical path references) so each developer in a team has to build and maintain it. It's madness.
Oh well. To each his own.
I don't care, I looked at it and there was no obvious way to have a project for me in a familiar structure.
Do you know how I normally work? I always use ant (fuck maven), I create the build.xml and build.properties files by hand. Then I import the project into Eclipse with normal source import and it becomes a project, which can be built from Eclipse, but which I build from command line with ant build before when producing an installable package.
Eclipse shows me only what I want to see: source and package structure and file system (which I normally don't bother looking at with Eclipse browser).
That's all I want to see, I don't want to see all of those bizarre preset files, I don't want to see a 'dist' directory with a war file, I don't want to see anything called 'nbproject' with who knows what inside, I don't care, I don't want to see 'branding' directory with 'core' and 'modules', I don't want to see 'private' etc.
I don't care to find out why it creates 'master.jnlp' by itself and I am absolutely 100%, unequivocally am not interested in guessing whether it is modifying files and settings for me by itself when I do something.
I don't want an IDE to hide things from me, to do things for me that I didn't ask for.
Once it does that (and it did it, by pre-creating various shit I didn't ask for) that's it. My trust is gone. I will try it for a little while but once an hour passes by and I still don't know whether it's changing stuff on the background I am not asking for, it's done, it's gone, it's in the trash and off my desktop.
It's frustrating for you? For me what's frustrating is somebody's idea that they can do hidden things from me in my project. That's the reason I left Visual Age and JBuilder by the way, except those were requirements of the company, so I didn't have too much choice. But I wouldn't use them myself. I use Eclipse because I can actually trust it to do only what I tell it to do and nothing behind my back and nothing I didn't ask for.
I don't know why you are frustrated, it's not your problem that people find NetBeans to be something they don't want to use.
You can't handle the truth.
There is another gotch too. Previous releases of Solaris have been backwards compatible, but in order to change to Solaris 11 Express from OpenSolaris, you must remove PostgreSQL first!! http://blogs.sun.com/observatory/en_US/entry/upgrading_from_opensolaris_2009_06 I bet that pus a smile on the face of the PostgreSQL developers!
One thing which I haven't seen mentioned is hobbyist usage, especially on surplus UltraSPARC hardware. I recently acquired a used Ultra 5 on which is now installed Solaris 11 Express. So far, my only issues have been getting a working X configuration and getting a Prism2-based WiFi card to work (PCI, supposedly supported by the pcwl(5) driver).
I'm an old Unix/Linux geek, but my last Solaris exposure was Sol9 on a Sparc 20. It has, so far, been interesting to learn about some of the newer innovations such as ZFS and the new service handling and administration.