Oracle Solaris 11 Express Released 160
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)."
Wait, what? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Wait, what? (Score:1, Flamebait)
These are the same people who use words like "good", "evil", "oppression", "abuse" and any number of other meaningless adjectives to describe computer software and the companies who create it.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wait, what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wait, what? (Score:2)
Never forget that linguistics is generally overlooked in English-speaking countries.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:2)
doesn't that just make them a Corporation?
All Corporations are driven by profit above and beyond anything else.
We've proven time and time again in every industry that Corporations will do completely amoral, downright illegal things in the search of profits.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Funny)
If what you say is true, then how do you describe Apple?
More evil then Microsoft, but looking FABULOUS doing it?
Re:Wait, what? (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, looks that way to me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 (Score:4, 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?
Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 (Score:4, 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)
Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 (Score:2)
If you look at the list of requirements for a program to be Open Source,
http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd [opensource.org]
No 6 says "6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor". Saying you can't use it on a production server doesn't appear to comply with that.
Similarly, the Free Software definition
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html [gnu.org]
Freedom 0 says you should be allowed to run the program for any purpose.
So yes, I would say OpenSolaris has been killed off and replaced with a demoware program.
Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 (Score:4, 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.
Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 (Score:2)
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.
"limited License to use the Programs only for the purpose of developing, testing, prototyping and demonstrating your applications, and not for any other purpose."
I don't know where you are getting "for anything" from, this is in plain, non-legaleze English. If you already pay for Solaris support, AFAIK, this is also covered, and you can use it for whatever, like in a Nexenta for example. My God, they have given you the source to most of it, and there are other community supported binary distributions of that.
I know paying to use something is hard to understand, and paying to use something with restrictions more so, and using something for free with restrictions even more so, but I'll leave you with this. Is there any reason for not being as grateful for any part of this being free, than you are grateful that any part of any FOSS is free at all? I feel a strong sense of entitlement on /. sometimes.
Where in either Free Software or Open Source philosophy is "all software should be this way" prescribed??
Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 (Score:2)
Is there any reason for not being as grateful for any part of this being free
There's a fairly obvious reason not to be grateful. The only things they'll let you do for free are things that are likely to make them money in the immediate future. Am I supposed to be grateful that Oracle have "generously" not charged me for the privilege of allowing me to do things that will help them rake in the cash? Especially as I could do most of them anyway, just via alternative routes that wouldn't make them money.
Seriously, what's with the "bow down before your corporate overlords and be grateful, serf" attitude?
I know paying to use something is hard to understand, and paying to use something with restrictions more so
It's not hard to understand. What's hard to understand is why anyone would go for this when (for example) Windows Server and various Linux distros are available for less, and have much less risk of lock-in that'll cost you $$$ in the future.
Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 (Score:2)
Hell you can't even run Solaris on someone elses hardware and BUY! support.
False now:
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/solaris/non-sun-x86-081976.html [oracle.com]
Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 (Score:2)
I'm putting together a chart of all the different distros and O.S.es that can run ZFS. I'll try to keep it updated with the build numbers and special features of each one:
http://petertheobald.blogspot.com/2010/11/101-zfs-capable-operating-systems.html [blogspot.com]
Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 (Score:2)
I wrote at the top and the bottom of the chart 'Please contribute info, links to distros, etc. and I will keep this page updated. '
So you could have, you know, contributed.
It would have been more helpful than coming back to Slashdot to complain.
But good idea about updating the Wikipedia entry.
Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 (Score:2, Insightful)
They're not killing Solaris as an OS.
They are in effect killing Solaris as an open platform and making it more like Windows.
Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 (Score:2)
Re:Wait, what? (Score:2)
Wasn't Oracle going to kill all good stuff from Sun according to the slashdot hivemind?
Well, Oracle Solaris Express only exists because Open Solaris got killed. So, yeah. I think the hive mind pretty much called it on this one. Oracle has been actively, systematically destroying the good name of Sun. What's left is a stinky corpse stuffed full of medical waste that Oracle raped.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wait, what? (Score:4, 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!
Re:Wait, what? (Score:2)
Re:Wait, what? (Score:2)
well .. admittedly 'IBM Solaris' sounds worse -- we're left with the lesser of two evils I guess.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:2)
How about HP Solaris?
Re:Wait, what? (Score:2)
Wasn't Oracle going to kill all good stuff from Sun according to the slashdot hivemind?
What does "not allowed to be used in production" mean to you?
Re:Wait, what? (Score:2)
Re:Wait, what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Kill? I suppose it depends on your definition of "kill".
They did kill OpenSolaris. The code, process, and community was destroyed and made unavailable to the community as a whole; it's now (essentially) freeware/shareware. Support, what's that?
Thankfully, OSol was forked, and we now have several viable alternatives - a couple of which do what people need 'better' than Solaris itself (ie 'gobs of clustered network storage').
As for Solaris in general... Solaris, particularly due to ZFS, is the biggest reason why Oracle bought Sun. The other properties are circumstantial and, I'd argue, largely inconsequential to Oracle's ends. Virtualbox might play in there somewhere, and I'm sure Java will as well (largely due to licensing anti-competitive behavior on Oracle's part).
Re:Wait, what? (Score:2)
Well... That does not sound very open to me.
Re:Solaris was the only good thing from Sun. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Solaris was the only good thing from Sun. (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Re:Solaris was the only good thing from Sun. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Solaris was the only good thing from Sun. (Score:2)
Re:Solaris was the only good thing from Sun. (Score:2)
They already do. That's the problem.
Re:Solaris was the only good thing from Sun. (Score:5, 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.
Re:Solaris was the only good thing from Sun. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Solaris was the only good thing from Sun. (Score:2)
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.
Re:Solaris was the only good thing from Sun. (Score:2)
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.
Re:Solaris was the only good thing from Sun. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Solaris was the only good thing from Sun. (Score:5, 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?
Re:VirtualBox? (Score:4, 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 [freebsd.org]
Re:Wait, what? (Score:2)
How exactly did you become a professional troll? Did Microsoft hire you for their Get The Facts campaign?
Re:Wait, what? (Score:2)
wait a minute! when did Windows 2008 R2 become free to use and download?
Re:Wait, what? (Score:2)
wait a minute! when did Windows 2008 R2 become free to use and download?
It's not free to use and download, but neither is Solaris if you want to actually use it commercially - and Windows 2008 R2 works out a lot cheaper to license, especially when you take into account Oracle's restrictions on what hardware you can license Solaris for.
Do not want (Score:4, 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.
Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use (Score:1)
Solaris is dead as fried chicken
Re:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use (Score:2)
Re:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use (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".
Re:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use (Score:3, Interesting)
Given that Solaris usage has been declining for ten years now, Oracle is pushing Solaris back into an ever higher end niche as a response and those using free development tools have Unix-like alternatives they can use for any purpose it's a bit optimistic to think they have anyone by the short and curlies. You can have as many hits as you like from other dealers and many would consider that what Oracle is selling is sherbet. I just can't see where Solaris is going now where it hasn't already been or tried to be.
Re:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use (Score:2)
It's a time honoured tradition, often rightly or wrongly compared to a drug dealer's "the first hit is free, kid".
The president of one of my previous companies fondly compared it to an alien that attaches to your face and you can't get it off.
Re:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use (Score:2)
The president of one of my previous companies fondly compared it to an alien that attaches to your face and you can't get it off.
If an alien attaches to my face, quite frankly, I am not hoping it will "get off". However, that would be a good analogy for what Oracle is doing to their Solaris customers.
Alternative take... (Score:2)
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.
Re:Full, Supported Release -- CORRECTION (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Full, Supported Release -- caveat (Score:2)
Not anymore, they finally created this:
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/solaris/non-sun-x86-081976.html [oracle.com]
Re:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use (Score:2)
"Yes, it's a commercial product. And like many commercial products, it's available free for evaluation or for use by developers. However if you wish to deploy it on your production server, you should be obtaining a support contract"
No, that's not about support contracts. You need an usage license.
"which if you're serious about production is probably a good idea anyway."
Which you'll get *on top* of your usage license.
Re:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use (Score:2)
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.
Oh, an enemy of Linux is an enemy of FOSS, is that your argument? Do we care?
Re:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use (Score:2)
Oh, an enemy of Linux is an enemy of FOSS, is that your argument? Do we care?
No, it's the antithesis of FOSS because not only is it closed source, it has a Field of Use restriction preventing you from doing anything useful with it - and if you want the restriction removed, you have to pay Oracle a small fortune every year.
Someone must die (Score:3, Insightful)
Minor quibble... (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
Re:Minor quibble... (Score:5, Informative)
A mere $1000,- per Socket.
https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:product:2847258479365119::NO:RP,3:P3_LPI,P3_PROD_HIER_ID:27242443094470222098916,14755487300180585563861 [oracle.com]
Re:Minor quibble... (Score:2)
Yep, what really matters is how it compares with say RHEL.
Excellent news (Score:2)
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.
Great!! (Score:2)
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....
Re:Great!! (Score:2)
I reconsider my hasty comment. They do allow use for internal development purposes. It's not free as in beer, but that's actually not too bad.
"The Open Source and Its Enemies" ... (Score:3, Insightful)
How come when an Oracle story gets posted these days, I think of Karl Popper's work . . . ?
From the license (Score:5, 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
Re:From the license (Score:2)
disclose results of any benchmark test results related to the Programs without our prior consent
Oracle has never had any faith in their own products, and when they pretend to by offering performance bounties and such, they are burned badly.
Solaris under ESX? (Score:2)
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...
Re:Solaris under ESX? (Score:2)
I'm guilty of drinking that ESX koolaid, but only because it tastes sooooooo gooood. I wonder sometimes if I'll be killed in the end by some poison.
Yesterday's News (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yesterday's News (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, it's 17 times less relevant than AIX, at least in the Top 500 [top500.org].
Re:Yesterday's News (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.
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.
Sparc T3? Interesting... (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.
Re:Sparc T3? Interesting... (Score:2)
Re:Sparc T3? Interesting... (Score:2)
I remember the T2, it was introduced while I was still working at this large telecom equipment manufacturer that shall remain nameless - but I'll just say it's headquartered in Finland. We received a server with a single T2, and our multithreaded Java application just got a 4-fold speedup, compared to a contemporary (for then) 2-box, dual Intel CPU per node cluster. The performance was actually 42:10 (arbitrary units). So I do believe there is some workloads for which the T2 (and T3) are ideal. The cluster was running Linux, but even the Linux guru in our group was sufficiently impressed, that he decided to lobby for the T2 solution.
Which was rejected for political reasons, but that's a different story.
Time to move to RHEL 6 (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a wonderfully simple solution to this. Time to move off them expensive SPARC boxes...
Re:Time to move to RHEL 6 (Score:2, Insightful)
Solaris future is Oracle's 300,000 customers (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Solaris future is Oracle's 300,000 customers (Score:2)
Yep, quotes from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/08/sun_bonuses_ibm/ [theregister.co.uk] :
"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."
Found one bug so far (Score:2, Funny)
Oddly, after reboot it's now displaying the proper date.
ZFS features (Score:2)
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.
Re:ZFS features (Score:2)
Whaddya want for nothin? (Score:2)
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.
No more community support... (Score:2)
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...
Re:But ... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes [opensolaris.org]
Re:But ... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:But ... (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.
Re:But ... (Score:3, Informative)
[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 ~]#
no, they really didn't have 2.6 support. (Score:2, Informative)
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! [jbit.net] 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) [sun.com].
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.
Re:no, they really didn't have 2.6 support. (Score:3, Informative)
False.
I used a simple image file from openvz I believe. There was NO tampering needed to get this working. Simply pointing the zoneadm installer to use the tar.gz file. Sure it's not a "REAL" install, but it's by no means "undocumented tampering"
I've actually been running a full rtorrent with web interface (XML-RPC) without ANY hiccup for over the last year.
This was first running on snv118, but now I'm running snv134. My friend was running his similar setup on snv118 as well. Not sure why that was a report for rm not working, because I'm quite sure if it was as foobar'd as you claim, NOTHING would work. I have had barely any issues except what I list below.
I have ANOTHER 2.6 brandZ running a full mysql database, while another runs X-forwarding and shell access.
I actually had WINE running one at one point for utorrent, but there were some issues with some libraries, so dns wouldn't work only for utorrent.
Re:no, they really didn't have 2.6 support. (Score:2)
Re:no, they really didn't have 2.6 support. (Score:3, Informative)
lx2.6 (Linux kernel 2.6 support) is considered experimental. It runs fine for me and a couple others that I know, but cannot say if it will work for you. There are certain things that WILL NOT work. Your best bet is to just try it.
Mind you these zones I run aren't heavily utilized, but I do know hash checking torrents doesn't give the CPU a break. It's nice seeing each process in a zone show up in my main OpenSolaris "top" process tree.
Check out this forum: http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=466361&tstart=0 [opensolaris.org] read "jwhitby3"'s post on using the openvz image.
The posts are from early October, and b131 wasn't even out then. jwhitby3 is reportedly using 2009.06.. So build 111b or so.
First login, you'll need to use zlogin -S to change the root pass. After that, it should run beautifully... Just probably not a good idea to run it in a true production environment.
Re:no, they really didn't have 2.6 support. (Score:3, Informative)
Almost forgot..
Here's the info page on OpenSolaris
http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+brandz/linux_2_6 [opensolaris.org]
You can follow pretty closely - ignoring the guide about creating your own image since you'll be using an openvz image. The rest is relevant. .. Just remember they're removing lx support in the newest versions =(
Also I think the /etc/resolv.conf file doesn't exist after setting up the zone.. So you'll need to create one to do anything practical online.