Belenix, a live CD based on OpenSolaris, has seen the release of version 0.4.3. The Belenix people say this release is major performance upgrade, and includes several fixes such as a new file sorting algorithm to process the DTrace output, some stuff regarding Xserver which leads to boottime being decreased by 20 seconds, various installer bugs, and much more. Rejoice. By the way, here is a chart comparing ZFS with Linux RAID/LVM options.
It’s really great to see opensolaris implemented by more and more distro producers as I have seen great stability and performance in solaris than with the so heavy linux distros in general.
But, there’s still a huge disadvantage to x86 opensolaris in contrary to linux, namely applications. Solaris applications written to SPARC CPUs will not work for solaris x86! So, the search for x86 solaris applications will be like searching for a pin in a jungle. But, still I believe this is to change, it’s the same phase Linux passed years ago, and now It’s solaris time, and I am sure it will pass it.
I used to test x86 solaris in the past; where I had very hard time configuring XF86Config to recognize my monitor, but now with 5.11 b38 my monitor was recognized and supported immediately with the correct refresh rate, resolution and color depth “1920x1200x24@60Hz); only windows vista 53xx and solaris was able to recognize and then support this high resolution from at least 20 tested OSs; and for that I give credit to solaris and i had faith in its future!! Well Done Sun
Edited 2006-05-13 22:42
Well one major application for Solaris on i386/amd64 is Oracle 10g: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/database/oracle1…
And since you can run SunCluster on Solaris 10/{i386|amd64} it should be possible to run Oracle 10g in RAC mode (parallel)…. as long as you can come up with the license fees
Don’t forget the freeware either – http://www.blastwave.org has a pretty good array of popular packages available for Solaris on i386|amd64 and sparc.
I wonder how long it will take devs to port this so that it works on solaris distros
Well Nvidia have 3d Drivers for Solaris, though they are for their Quadro cards (officially… ways to get around that), however does XGL use Direct Rendering or can if fall back to GLX (indirect)? Cause i don’t know if solaris supports DRI at moment.
XGL uses what the GL driver uses. The nvidia GL driver doesn’t use DRI but has it’s own way to talk from userspace to kernelspace (nvidia module isn’t a DRI/DRM one but creates /dev/nvidiactl, /dev/nvidiaX).
So if you have GLX accelerated rendering up and running it should also be possible to run XGL. But XGL also uses some GL extensions so these must be supported by the nvidia driver, too.
The last time I visited belenix, the domain name was belinix.org . Now it points to genunix.org . Why is it so ?
And an unrelated query… How easy is it to learn to administer sun solaris OS ? Being a linux user myself, I am curious about the degree of learning curve one encounters in switching to solaris.
genunix is the opensolaris community web site, its on a much better pipe to the internet, i believe the belenix domain still works, just genunix better capable of dealing with the bandwidth needs of a new release.
And an unrelated query… How easy is it to learn to administer sun solaris OS ? Being a linux user myself, I am curious about the degree of learning curve one encounters in switching to solaris.
The differences are greater now with Solaris 10. It is still unix, so you’ll feel right at home, but when you get to the more advanced topics you’ll notice there are differences (like how to mirror your bootdisks, patch management, etc). All these things you will be able to learn and knowing Linux and how a unix system works will be a great help to you.
It’s also a good time to get into Solaris because of all the cool new stuff like the “Service Management Framework” which replaces the traditional init system and zones. Not only are they fun to play with, but they’re new to traditional Solaris admins too, so the knowledge gap between you and senior admins is reduced.
well, as usual you have an options these days. If you don’t feel comfortable with native Solaris environment, but still to jump & try OpenSolaris techonolgy, use NexentaOS (http://www.nexenta.org). You will find bunch of GNU applications available as well as familiar Debian environment.
Good luck!
I really pray for OSX Linux and Windows Comment to be like the comment here.
i know its Impossible.
What do you mean?
Everybody knows that linux and OS 10 are better than Solaris, so naturally nobody’s gonna flame on about it.
*ducks*
🙂
Hey, it was a joke, no need to mod down 🙂
1 point up to you for the laugh, LOL.