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)
Someone must die (Score:3, Insightful)
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".
Yes, looks that way to me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 (Score:3, Insightful)
"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 . . . ?
really? (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Wait, what? (Score:1, Insightful)
Microsoft is not good, they're evil. They exercise oppression over true innovation. They abuse their user base through the use of meaningless, proprietary technologies and perversions of established protocols to further their objectives of market dominance.
BTW, "oppression" is a noun, and "abuse" is either a noun or a verb, depending on the context. Neither of them are adjectives.
Re:Do not want (Score:1, Insightful)
Thanks, Larry. Unfortunately, we're up to our ears in new hardware running virtual instances of Solaris 8 and 9 still. ...
I call BULLSHIT!!!!
Virtual instances of the damn-near nonexistent Solaris 9 for x86?!?! Or the runs-on-no-hardward, crappy-supported P.O.S that was x86 Solaris 8?
Or you're running something SPARC-based, which means you're running Solaris 10 underneath?
Most likely you're full of shit.
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.
Yesterday's News (Score:5, Insightful)
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 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:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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:Wait, what? (Score:0, Insightful)
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, Insightful)
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: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.
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:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Time to move to RHEL 6 (Score:2, Insightful)
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: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: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: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.