The Schillix OpenSolaris project has announced its second release, SchilliX 0.2, and a Live CD available for download. Highlights of 0.2 include 30 second boot time, boot from CD or USB-stick, installation to hard drive, and self-healing services. Software includes cdrecord, star, bash, bz2, fakeroot, gmake, gpatch, gtar, gzip, pod2man, texinfo, unzip, wget and much more.
Everybody (including Sun)’s jaw dropped when they saw someone make a distro out of OpenSolaris so rapidly. Of course it didn’t have a desktop or anything yet..but then a great big nothing. No other distro’s rose up. Sun had all the attention because of the open sourcing, and it seemed it still had the only viable version.
I’m wondering what is taking everyone so long to give Sun distroitis? Or are the other things at work?
I’m wondering what is taking everyone so long to give Sun distroitis?
Debian/Solaris is on its way. That’s all I can say for now.
There is another LiveCD effort that boots into a Graphical XFce4 desktop called BeleniX at http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/belenix_home.html
Well remember that they didn’t realease all of the code right away. They’re releasing it in chunks as they go through it all:
http://opensolaris.org/os/about/roadmap/
At this point it’s really only for developers to tinker around with. It’s not like Linux 10 years ago where nerds are building it from scratch. They already have a huge codebase already that they need to go through. They have to get permission from 3rd parties to release some components and re-write missing pieces that they don’t own the copyright to.
Once the whole thing is in the wild and the interested developers have a feel for it, then you’ll see it start to take off.
As someone has said there’s already a Debian version coming as well as a PPC port from http://www.blastware.org. Geeks are working on it, just give them time.
Just look at /. and read aboutthe new GNU/Solaris Debian project. This could be a real big deal and get someserious momentum behind OpenSolaris.
In other news, SchilliX 0.2.1 was released a week ago.
The big news for the 0.2 release was inclusion of the aperture driver to support X on i386 and functional 64-bit support. An ISO assembly kit has also been made available, and the replacement math library has been cleaned up some more.
I remember Debian FreeBSD effort. I fail to see the advantage of having GNU userland over FreeBSD or Solaris. Even if one did such a thing I believe it will come encumbered with license incompatibilities between CDDL/GPL (some packages not delivered in default installation etc). If anyone prefers GNU, they can as well go for Linux IMHO.
Nexenta, AKA GNU/Solaris, uses the Solaris libc and userland to maintain Solaris compatibility. It’s more like Solaris with Debian package management than Debian with a Solaris kernel. And speaking of Debian, the packages are based more on Ubuntu than Debian.
I’ll download that live cd and give it a whirl in qemu. Hopefully it will run in that.
Why would you run a live cd in qemu?
Too lazy to burn it to cd, and if I don’t like it I won’t be wasting a cd (as cheap as they are)
Hopefully hardware manufacturers will find that the open source and stable API/ABI of the Solaris kernel makes building and maintaining drivers a piece of cake.
The Linux kernel has a pretty impressive pace of development, but the constant, seemingly uneccessary churn in kernel API/ABI is a major pain when it comes time to do something outside whatever your distribution has decided to package.
I almost certainly wouldn’t bother with Solaris as an OS (all its ‘neat’ features such as dtrace and zones are completely irrelevant to me), but I can certainly see some merit in using a kernel that doesn’t force anyone who develops with it’s code into a perpetual ‘upgrade treadmill’
I understand the argument that the developers don’t care about binary drivers, but even people writing GPL drivers are forced to constantly bug fix and upgrade them as the other kernel devs arbitarily decide to break stuff.
I find it stunningly hypocritical that the Linux kernel devs see it as paramount to keep their freedom to make changes in the way the kernel works by ensuring nobody can code against a stable ABI, and then beat up people like Hans Reiser because he sees it as paramount to keep his freedom to make changes in the way his filesystem works by implementing his own incompatible plugin system.
I understand the argument that the developers don’t care about binary drivers, but even people writing GPL drivers are forced to constantly bug fix and upgrade them as the other kernel devs arbitarily decide to break stuff.
I find it stunningly hypocritical that the Linux kernel devs see it as paramount to keep their freedom to make changes in the way the kernel works by ensuring nobody can code against a stable ABI, and then beat up people like Hans Reiser because he sees it as paramount to keep his freedom to make changes in the way his filesystem works by implementing his own incompatible plugin system.
The solution to this is quite simple for open-source drivers – put forth the effort of making those drivers part of the kernel, not external to it. When that happens, instead of you having to recode your driver due to an ABI/API change in the kernel, the developer making the change has the responsibility of fixing the problem.
SchilliX will boot from a USB memory stick, No CD required. I downloaded and booted this morning – it is very fast to boot.