Submitted by “Sun’s Ian Murdock gave a presentation about OpenSolaris at LugRadio Live this past weekend. He hopes to expose open source enthusiasts to unique Sun technologies by creating a cohesive distribution that will provide a complete environment that is adequate for day-to-day use. This will involve bringing together the Solaris operating system and a diverse assortment of open source community projects and “adding a package management system to hold all these pieces together,” Murdock stated. The final release will take place in May and the distribution will adhere to a six-month release cycle, just like Fedora and Ubuntu.”
Looking forward to this.Used the prelims before and they were pretty good.
Solaris is a great OS.
In the slide showing on that picture it says GNU Userland…
There was a whole project, dunno if it was Nextenda, or Belenix, or some other one.
Whichever one it was, what does this mean now that Sun is going that route?
BTW, I hate Solaris’s find and grep so much that every time I need to do some work on a Solaris machine at work I have a little tarbal that I copy over into my local directory (no root access) and use that has gnu findutils and gnu grep
I think you are thinking of Nexenta.
http://www.nexenta.org/os
It doesn’t really mean that much, I think.
The Nexenta project seems to aim towards Nexenta Core becoming an official Debian/GNU port to the Open Solaris kernel.
http://www.nexenta.org/os/CollaborationWithDebian
This is by no means Sun’s wishes for the future of its Open Solaris distribution, known as Project Indiana.
What Sun seems to wish for i more like a reshaping of certain parts of Solaris/Open Solaris to make it behave more as expected by users of ‘modern Unix-like OSs’.
This involves better a userland, a modern package manager and an up to date installation of Gnome instead of the Sun branded ‘Java Desktop System’ or CDE.
Edited 2008-04-16 08:40 UTC
Solaris has multiple userlands for a while. Which one gets used just depends if they’re in front of the rest of the PATH env variable or not.
Developer Preview 1 had /usr/gnu/bin in front, apparently with the coming May release, you can chose during install.
OpenSolaris developers made a long way in the good direction polishing rather old Solaris “base system”, but old tools remained old, like grep and find that FunkyELF mentioned.
Currently (Open)Solaris does not even support virtual consoles (!), so if you are in Gnome, you can not just CTRL ALT F1 and do something in terminal, you have to kill whole x11 and then GDM will restart, so if you did not disbled it also earlier you will end again with a graphical login. And if x11 will hang, you have to hard reset …
About OpenSolaris package management (pkg.opensolaris.org), can be called as a alhpa solution at most currently, it offers a very small amount of packages, not even telling WMs like openbox or fluxbox, they are just gone. Compare that 18000+ avialable packages from FreeBSD Ports or Debian APT and you will feel the difference.
They have A LOT of work to do, and I am sure that we will not have finished product as 2008.05 releases, but there are chances that 2008.11 will be more polished and complete.
Solaris believes in backward compatability, so they ship a whole range of “core utils” usually the first thing most people do is to change their default path generally to something like this:
PATH=/usr/bin/xpg6/bin:/usr/bin/xpg4/bin:/usr/ccs/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/uc b/bin
This will give you behaviour that’s compliant with POSIX.1-2001 and SUSv3 (Unix 2003)
In Opensolaris there is now a /usr/gnu/bin folder so you could change your path to include that as first default location.
If for example you were some commercial company running a piece of software that was 17-18years old (last release) and had been built for a SysVR4 system then you could change your path to just:
PATH=/usr/ccs/bin:/usr/bin
This path supports a system that is SVID3 (SVR4) and XPG3 compliant.
It’s all well explained at the following link:
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/companion-discuss/2006-April/…
That is very good attitude, FreeBSD is also going this way, and that is one of these things that Linux does not have (and for looong time will not have).
Sun wants to make OpenSolaris as a UNIX’s Ubuntu, so it would just be nice to make good defaults.
Thanks you for link, reading it now …
You define the quality of a packaging system based on the amount of available packages?
2008.05 will be finished as in having the infrastructure delivered (new installer, ZFS boot, beadm, pkg). That release is considered beta, and I think 2008.11 might be, too.
Of course not, but it even does not work correctly (Preview 2), searching is useless, its better to grep pkg.opensolaris.org for package you seek, also all these prefixes are little useless, almost all packages has SUNW prefix, what for? For example SUNWgnome-disk-analyzer. I would understand such naming if SUNW will be Solaris core or “base system” packages, but this is Gnome, there is no Sun in it.
Also about count, package management is usefull when you can add all software that you need, package management is useless if you cant add many of your day to day work apps, so currently pkg on OpenSolaris IS useless, but we will see how it will look like in the end of May this year.
It would be even better to put NetBSD’s pkgsrc.org here instead of that pseudo apt-get like pkg management currently.
PS
My attitude to (Open)Solaris can be taken as offensive, but do not take it that way, I prefer Solaris to Linux for example, but there are many places where (Open)Solaris needs to catchup comparing to FreeBSD or Linux.
It will just tak time, but it is crusial to spend this time on good sollutions.
Chech ALSA and PulseAudio from Linux, they add more layers instead of doing what should be done. OSS is now open source and its avialable on all major open source licenses, GPL2, BSD, CDDL, it offers similar functionality to Pulseaudio and its MILLION LIGHT YEARS better then ALSA, great API, cross platform, well documentaed, and the most important, works without any workarounds, just works, a things that ALSA can only dream about, but Linux devs go deeper and deeper into that shit, well, its their time actually …
Does not work correctly in what way? I am able to install, uninstall, search, and list packages. Which specific aspect are you having problems with?
Did you file a bug at defect.opensolaris.org?
Searching is not useless. Also, the version of ips in preview2 is a few months old. The ips team has made several advances since then. Remember that ips is barely a year old and is being implemented rapidly.
As one of the contributors to the ips project, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the next release.
Package names have nothing to do with the package system, that should be obvious.
In this case, the packages still have the SUNW prefix because they are being imported from package definitions for Solaris 10, etc. Sun’s previous package naming policy stated that packages must be prefixed with the stock ticker or a company identifier.
This will be changing for ips packages in the near future, but more important work is being done at the moment.
Then depending on who you ask, it may or may not be useless. For example, I can add all the software *I* need, so it isn’t useless to me. I think your definition of useless needs a lot of work.
Availability of packages again has nothing to do with the packaging system itself.
Finally, since ips provides compatibility with svr4, you can install thousands of packages available here:
http://blastwave.org/
or here:
http://sunfreeware.com/
or here:
http://pkg.blastwave.org/
Constructive criticism would be more helpful.
Stop-A boot RET
oops, no that’s not a virtual console
Well, they will have VirtualBox which FreeBSD does not. I am using qemu+kqemu on Beastie but would love a VTx/VMX based solution like VirtualBox or KVM.
I really would like to have Solaris on my laptop but it still doesn’t support SATA RAID controllers like the VIA VT6421.
The only way to use them under Solaris is to do a BIOS emulation configuration that my BIOS doesn’t support.
So I keep on waiting for the day Solaris supports my controller. All other OS are quite happy with it.
—
Paulo
I dont understand why you want you use your RAID controller? ZFS doesnt require RAID controller. ZFS can also fix problem that hardware raid can not handle. I trust ZFS more than a hardware raid.
ZFS detects errors within a few hours
http://blogs.sun.com/elowe/entry/zfs_saves_the_day_ta
ZFS can guarantee stuff no other can guarantee
http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/zfs_end_to_end_data
I guess what Sun says about ZFS is about as reliable as what hardware RAID vendors says about their products.
ZFS fixed my desync 500GB mirror in under 13 seconds. Try that with a traditional RAID-1.
but zfs cant keep data with powerloss like a real hw raid. if my fileserver loses power all data in the raidcontroller will containpower and unwritten data can be written during next boot.
Doesn’t guarantee all data makes it properly to the disks, though. Otherwise, people wouldn’t talk about the RAID5 write hole (ZFS RAID doesn’t have that, since we’re at it).
For that matter:
1) Systems where it matters are using UPS backup.
2) Nothing stops you from not using the RAID functionality on a battery caching RAID controller.
ONLY if you hardware raid has a battery-backed cache…not likely any cheap VIA-based RAID solution is using a battery-backed cache.
I’ll take ZFS any day over most RAID controllers…at least until you get into the high-end hardware RAID cards seemingly only affordable by businesses.
yep my controller has battery backup. i was not the poster with the via controller. that was why a mentioned “Real hardware raid”. and not cheap software raid
I have this 8 ports SATA PCI-X card (no hardware raid). It fits into an ordinary PCI slot. It gets automatically detected by Solaris at install. Works flawlessly.
(PCI-X slot is for server mobos, in that case achieving >1 GB/sec).
http://shopper.cnet.com/i-o-cards/supermicro-add-on-card/4014-3019_…
It is not that I want to use RAID. I want that Solaris talks to the controller, otherwise it doesn’t see my hard-disk.
It complains that it is an unsupported controller, and installation stops.
As I said, I only have this problem with Solaris.
He pointed out that much of the success that Linux has enjoyed in the server room is a result of its increasing popularity on the desktop among system administrators and other IT specialists
So that’s why Linux has stolen Sun’s lunch, and that means all they have to do is get OpenSolaris on sysadmins’ desktops and then Sun will be able to take over the server room again. Good luck with that. I think what we’re looking at is the ripple effect of the Linux server adoption spreading to the desktop and back again. Sun didn’t lose the server room because of Linux desktop usage.
“adding a package management system to hold all these pieces together”
A package management system to serve as a system integration tool. Go for it.
Special features of Sun’s highly sophisticated ZFS filesystem, for instance, are used to implement rollback support for package management.
I guess when you have a nice new tool, it’s the first thing you reach for. Sometimes you have to resist that and re-examine fundamentals.
I hope they are successful because competition is good for us all, but I am skeptical of the impact they will achieve.
How can they remain/be Sun unique if open-source? Or well, atleast if they are free open-source aswell.
This is not a Sun haters post
I like the direction things are headed, but:
#1) WPA/WPA2 support for iwi cards (very popular) isn’t there, or wasn’t in DP2.
#2) Suspend/Resume didn’t work on most laptops in DP2.
Are these going to be sorted for the May release? If I remember correctly, #1 was fixed in Nevada (added some cryptographic frameworks that were necessary), and as to #2 – I have no idea.
These will be two major stumbling blocks to adoption on laptops (if this is of Sun’s/the communities concern.)
Other than that, hopefully we’ll see some pkg usability updates (working search would be nice). I don’t really have many other complaints. There needs to be better integration of nwamd with gnome, as well, so changing wireless networks when you have multiple options/changing ethernet connection ips/etc can be done easily from the GUI.
Looking really forward to this release!
Edited 2008-04-17 19:47 UTC
The biggest stumbling block in my opinion is the inability to control a IDE/SATA drive’s power management. Recent laptop drives have idiotic power management features with aggressive default settings. Running OpenSolaris on a laptop gets you the same fun as they had with Linux, when drives suddenly started to park heads multiple times per minute. Except in Linux you have hdparm, but in Solaris not. I’ve filed a bug about this, but who knows when this will be implemented.