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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)."

28 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. Do not want by countSudoku() · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?
  2. Re:But ... by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yes

  3. Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use by Chuck_McDevitt · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use by syousef · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      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".

      --
      These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
  4. Yes, looks that way to me... by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  5. Minor quibble... by trims · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  6. Re:Full, Supported Release -- CORRECTION by gtirloni · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  7. Re:But ... by trims · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  8. Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 by gtirloni · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 by Corporate+Troll · · Score: 5, Informative

      He's talking about OpenSolaris... The open source branch. He's right about that, it's effectively been killed.

    2. Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 by ToasterMonkey · · Score: 3, Insightful

      He's talking about OpenSolaris... The open source branch. He's right about that, it's effectively been killed.

      Technically, that open source branch has not been killed, OpenSolaris the distribution has been rebranded as Solaris Express and supposedly the source will be released following binary releases rather than leading it. There are other projects based on that source that predate OpenSolaris, and then there is OpenIndiana which is supposedly going to be to Solaris as CentOS is to RHEL.
      Something like that anyway.

      All this OpenSolaris is dead talk amuses me. If anyone gave a damn about it, they'd simply be waiting for Solaris Express 11 that was announced when OS "died" or working with the other community driven Solaris distros with real communities. If you don't give a damn... what's this all about?

    3. Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 by jonwil · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Illumos is the real future of OpenSolaris IMO.
      Efforts are being made to remove anything from OpenSolaris that is closed source (especially anything with limits on redistribution)

    4. Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 by makomk · · Score: 3, Insightful

      OpenSolaris the distribution has been rebranded as Solaris Express

      With a licence agreement that forbids you from actually using it for anything. Want to use it? You need to pay Oracle a load of money, and they may not even let you do that unless you replace all your hardware with stuff supplied by them.

  9. Re:Wait, what? by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 3, Funny

    Wasn't Oracle going to kill all good stuff from Sun according to the slashdot hivemind?

    The good stuff (TM)(Oracle) is not quite dead yet. It's feeling much better. It thinks it might go for a walk.

    It doesn't want to go on the cart.

    It shouldn't be such a baby!

    --
    Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
  10. Re:But ... by carton · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  11. From the license by rrossman2 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  12. Yesterday's News by segedunum · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Yesterday's News by SigmundFloyd · · Score: 4, Informative

      Solaris is now a very high-end OS that's as relevant to people as AIX is

      Actually, it's 17 times less relevant than AIX, at least in the Top 500.

      --
      Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
    2. Re:Yesterday's News by ToasterMonkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      Why, because it's not "cool" or it doesn't meet some technical criteria? Is there really no space between IBM midrange hardware running AIX and the "Slashdot crowd"?
      I'm thinking that's a shockingly large amount of space.

  13. Re:Wait, what? by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yeah, people who use the word "evil" when talking about software and related companies are clearly ignorant incompetent morons with no idea what they are talking about. I also totally agree with you that "good" and "evil" are meaningless adjectives, that are only included in the dictionary because the companies creating dictionaries specialize in the "abuse" of the English language. Did you know that Google doesn't turn up any results showing "Oppression" as an adjective! So much for their "Do No Evil" slogan!

    --
    Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
  14. Re:Solaris was the only good thing from Sun. by renegadesx · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!
  15. Re:VirtualBox? by Galactic+Dominator · · Score: 3, Informative

    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 /brain
  16. Sparc T3? Interesting... by blind+biker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  17. Time to move to RHEL 6 by mikelieman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  18. Re:Wait, what? by geminidomino · · Score: 4, Funny

    If what you say is true, then how do you describe Apple?

    More evil then Microsoft, but looking FABULOUS doing it?

  19. Re:Solaris was the only good thing from Sun. by CynicTheHedgehog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  20. Re:Solaris was the only good thing from Sun. by Rysc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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