Ben’s Blog

http://planet.opensolaris.org/ is a good place to read up on the latest OpenSolaris news.  I have links below to three blogs that I read there today and some of my thoughts on them.

http://omniti.com/seeds/virtualization-zfs-and-zetaback has a decent (mostly nontechnical) overview of zones and using zfs with zones.

http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1032 compares the OpenSolaris distribution with Nexenta and also mentions Solaris Express Community Edition.  There are lots of Linux distributions and there are also a few different versions of Solaris/OpenSolaris out
there now.

The supported version of Solaris proper is Solaris 10 currently at update 6 (11/2008).  There will probably be a couple of more updates to this.  There may not be a Solaris 11.  Most people think the
OpenSolaris distribution is what will be supported as Solaris “Next” in the future (if Sun doesn’t get bought anyway).  Solaris 10 has patches and is what we run on our sparcs and a couple of production x86 servers here.

Solaris Express Community Edition (SX:CE) is like Solaris, but is based on the build of Solaris Nevada (code name for current developed version of (Open)Solaris).  Builds are scheduled to come out every two weeks (current available is build 111 (snv_111)).  This is (I think) the best way to get new features and bug fixes.  We run this on most of our x86 systems for features such as latest ZFS fixes and xVM support.

OpenSolaris was formerly called Project Indiana and is the result of Sun hiring Ian Murdock to make an OpenSolaris distribution seem more like Linux for Linux users.  They plan to release it every six months
or so with the third release scheduled for June.  It has an improved package system (IPS) which is the main thing that needed to be fixed with Solaris.  It also has the GNU user environment preferred which is good for GNU/Linux users trying it out, but causes some missed features such as the gnu chmod and ls not having zfs ACL support.  Solaris users would probably want to change their path so /usr/bin is before /usr/gnu/bin as a result.  I think a properly merged environment would need to be done before this can replace Solaris 10.

There are also some other opensolaris distributions that do not come from Sun.  The link I point to talks about Nexenta which is a GNU userland running on top of an opensolaris kernel using features such as zfs.  It uses the Debian apt package system.  Belenix is another distribution from India which a few Sun employees put out on their own.  It seems to have a strong following and produces a useful live CD.  The first opensolaris distribution was Schilix, but I don’t hear much on it anymore.

http://blogs.sun.com/nsolter/entry/becoming_an_opensolaris_power_user is a blog link to one of the authors of the OpenSolaris Bible where two of them give a 50 minute presentation on becoming an OpenSolaris power user. (I haven’t had time to watch it).

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 4:19 pm and is filed under DE-OSUG, Links, solaris. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.