While OpenSolaris 2008.05 is only two months old, work at Sun is already underway in preparing for the second OpenSolaris release, which will be known as OpenSolaris 2008.11 and has been codenamed Jericho.
While OpenSolaris 2008.05 is only two months old, work at Sun is already underway in preparing for the second OpenSolaris release, which will be known as OpenSolaris 2008.11 and has been codenamed Jericho.
it just getts better and better. I have a fealing they are leaving openoffice out though on purpose and waiting till 3.0 is realsed to start including it. either way i anxiously await the release.
“party on contect winners, party on”
It’s left out due to space constraints. There simply isn’t enough room to include the basic software and all the language support needed on a single cd.
Before you ask “why not a dvd?”: for right now, the target audience is a user of a single cd.
Edited 2008-07-16 01:25 UTC
Well the current iso of opensolaris-93 is delivered as a dvd image already because it exceeded the cd size. You can get the same release minus some goodies in a cd size iso image. So the target audience must not make that much of a difference. In fact I haven’t read any open marketing material that claimed the size of the image is going to make and difference at all for opensolaris. That is by force one size fits all.
—Bob
The target audience for OpenSolaris 2008.05 is very different from the SXCE audience.
If you read the advocacy, indiana and other mailing lists you will find many posts about the fact that a good portion of users do not have DVD drives for the users we are targeting. Especially in developing countries.
Limiting the size of the install media also helps focus the core of the system.
Ubuntu limits themselves to a single CD too, but they have less multi-lingual support and only deliver a single architecture (32-bit or 64-bit, not both) on a single CD.
Edited 2008-07-16 21:26 UTC
The target audience for OpenSolaris 2008.05 is very different from the SXCE audience.
If you read the advocacy, indiana and other mailing lists you will find many posts about the fact that a good portion of users do not have DVD drives for the users we are targeting. Especially in developing countries.
Limiting the size of the install media also helps focus the core of the system.
Ubuntu limits themselves to a single CD too, but they have less multi-lingual support and only deliver a single architecture (32-bit or 64-bit, not both) on a single CD. [/q]
I said nothing about “SXCE”. I know Nevada is a DVD image size. I said “OpenSolaris” aka Indiana is now over the size of of a cd image and it’s being distributed that way. So it is not the matter of limiting the size of Indiana’s image. Unless there is some data that shows some magical image size number that telcos have limits to support this.
This is all kind of silly marketing. Having a full DVD image of material isn’t going to harm Indiana. Damn I have to say “Indiana”. Nor does it take a thousand monkeys to produce the image. It doesn’t even take a lot of Sun resources to distribute this via torrent.
What ever the limitations are so be it.
—Bob
This is all about a very silly arbitrary limit that is suppose to grow
I’m very exited about OpenSolaris. This is one OS, yes there are allready distroes, but Sun’s Solaris will always be -the- Solaris and thus we will get a standard.
Sun seems to be a quite resourcefull company and I think OpenSolaris could become as usefull, or maybe even more usefull that Ubuntu/Fedora/SuSE.
I tried it on my laptop and it didn’t work very well(the installer crashed, it did find my Wifi though). Anyway, I’ll try to keep up with this project. Seems very exiting.
On the other hand: do we need another OSS *nix? We allready have Linux-distros, the BSDs and others. Is there a point to Solaris besides ZFS and DTrace? Will OpenSolaris ever appeal to non-devs?
I’m an internet/ebusiness infrastructure engineer and it appeals to me significantly, though we are on the SPARC release.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think opensolaris (project indiana) is available for sparc yet. I think that is something planned down the road.
I think you’re right.. I was referring to just stock SOLARIS.
I don’t get it, why the hell pretty much all the OpenSolaris-related reviews never go deeper than the GUI? Do people really think Gnome 2.22 running on top of something other than Linux is more exciting than Solaris’ own highlights? Heck, those reviews never even explain pfexec.
I find all this really weird, because there’s a lot of innovation going on in the Solaris land and Solaris is drastically different from Linux or the BSDs in many aspects. Still, reviewers only write about the Gnome version being used, what apps are bundled. Like yea, that’s gonna be very relevant since it’ll be very different from what you can see in any Linux distro.
The deepest those writers go is writing (briefly) about the packaging system or the installer. My take is that those writers are simply ignorant. You don’t need advanced skills to check software versions. They write about what they’re able to write about. I guess that’s good enough for some readers.
Although I agree they definetely could go deeper, most of the reviews seems to be a desktop focused “Could this be a Ubuntu-killer?” kind of review. From that angle, having focus on desktop-apps does make sense.
Would be really interesting to see more reviews from a more tech, developer and server-oriented angle though.
Although not written specifically to address developer or server based use, but I wrote an article that was more than just an extended Release Notes:
http://osnews.com/story/19823/A_Solaris_Administrator_Looks_at_Open…
A thread on the OpenSolaris forums talks about installing Oracle 10g on OpenSolaris:
http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=257279&tstart=0
Until people start complaining about the lack of depth of “review” articles, I would not expect a great deal of improvement.
That Solaris, is a good OS is hardly news. The big news is that it now looks really good as well.
Sun is famous for inventing incredible new technology just to fail at the last step, making it appealing to the end user. Even now they are a step behind, by the time this reach the users most Linux distros will be running Gnome 2.24 and not 2.22.
But you are of course right, that there is more to an OS than just the looks, one such thing would be hardware support, that is another area where Sun is far behind its Linux competitors, and that too needs to be resolved for Solaris to be ready for the masses.
It is nice to see the Solaris desktop coming along. We (meaning the Linux Guys, NetBSD Guys, Solaris Guys) are strong together. Solaris is, without a doubt, strong on the server. Die hards like Kawai (perhaps not the best choice of terms) also have faith in Solaris’ desktop possibilities.
I salute you (and us) all.
Linux, *BSD and Solaris all excel and suck in significant areas. Maybe we can all come up with a way to excel and suck in such a way as to complement one another more efficiently?
Edited 2008-07-15 22:33 UTC
Not a die-hard any more
I’ve got an iMac and MacBook – I put down the crack pipe of broken promises and realised that Solaris/Linux/etc will never be ready for me. I’m sure Solaris is great as a server, but I don’t think it’ll ever make that giant leap from the server to the desktop until such time that someone takes decisive leadership over the direction of the project.
I’m not sure it has to. Newbie friendliness and familiarity are important on the server, too. And that does not mean that Solaris has to be a winner on the desktop. Project Indiana and OpenSolaris are quite worthy. (As you likely know, I’m a Linux guy.)
I wish you joy with your Apples. But I would counsel patience regarding Free unix on the desktop. I can’t imagine using anything else, myself. And I’ve been monitoring the steady progress over the last 12 years or so. But YMMV. Stay tuned. And I didn’t really need to tell you that, did I? 🙂
Edited 2008-07-16 04:32 UTC
Having used Linux since 1995, I can tell you that after 13 years of waiting – ones patience just gives out in the end. Promises after promises after promises – and no delivery on them. Its like communism – people start off with the enthusaism of ‘buildinga new and better society’ then suddenly come to the realisation, after years of work – it has resulted in the ‘vision’. People are patient – when they see results that benefit them.
I’m still waiting for that to happen in the *NIX world. All I’ve seen so far as the rally cry in the Linux world is the psuedo-marxist clap trap of ‘raging against the status quo’ in favour of ‘a brave new world’.
I think the more obvious thing is the fact that there is a mount of unsexy things that need doing – the lack of progress, even after the split from XFree86 is a prime example of this. Xorg released, and a mountain of ‘show stoppers’ not addressed. Developers concerned about the drop in quality of the code.
No doubt I’ll have my post marked down due to some childish attitudes held by people on this forum.
Hi Kaiwai. BTW, I apologize for misspelling your name in my first post and then forgetting to note the mistake in my second.
I’ve been an advocate of unix on the desktop for a little over 20 years. And it does take patience.
Who made the promises? The thing is, in the FOSS community, any cheerleader can make promises. It’s up to us (the consumers) to put those promises in perspective. Some things happen very quickly in FOSS. Some aspects happen over positively glacial time spans. We tend not to like to talk about those.
FOSS has made substantial, if gradual, progress over the years. We’ve caused the proprietary players to sit up, take notice, change their competition strategies, and even look to see how FOSS can benefit them. We don’t have to be the market leader to “win”, as long as we consider “winning” to mean having a positive effect upon the world.
If I may be so bold… my advice is to use what you are comfortable with and what works for you, retain some idealism, but not take any promises so seriously and literally that they end up souring you in the end.
I’ve learned to content myself with slow but steady progress. Impatience on the part of advocates and cheerleaders is, in the end, counterproductive. And stressful, as well.
Live long and prosper,
Steve
So you’re now a die-hard Mac user instead?
Edited 2008-07-16 09:38 UTC
Always was
I guess I went through a *NIX phase. Having stopped using *NIX in 2003, I had a fit of optimism last year, and continuously disappointed for a whole year – after being told continuously ad nauseum that ‘things have improved’ when they haven’t.
I’m back using Mac and I can tell you that all these promises are nothing more than hollow rhetoric which I have heard all before. Mac OS X is the ‘UNIX for the mass’ – *NIX had its chance, it chose infighting and name calling anyone who dared to think that *NIX was anything but perfect. Well, here we are, 13 years later, and less than 1% using Linux – whilst Mac OS X has grown leaps and bounds.
Are they ever planning on releasing an Ultrasparc version? They are talking about the next release when there still is no current release for the hardware that Sun itself makes.
Yes, it’s planned later. Focusing on a single platform was necessary for resource and time reasons.
Since a good portion of developers are on x86, and the target audience is likely running x86, not SPARC, it made more sense to focus on x86.
I received my copy of openSolaris today and went in a hurry to install it. Its pretty, fast and it works like GNU/Linux pretty much (they are using gnome
). Too bad i couldnt install my broadcom (horrible) wireless and my ati radeon. Everything else is pretty good and very user friendly, i will give it a score 8 
if anyone remembers what actually happened to the city of Jericho, well it seems a weird name for something they hope will succeed, and not “crumble”.
Jericho is also situated just outside Jerusalem and it is regarded as the final obstacle before entering the promised land. Hence a big deal was made about bringing down the walls of Jericho.
It also represented a quick and improbable victory over a strong, entrenched enemy…symbolism?
IIRC Jericho’s walls crumbled because of divine intervention… the interpretation might be that no human could bring them down.
As I see it the three different worlds share common components though they are not the same. Different kernels different ideas. What makes me really sad as a Linux/BSD user is that there is innovation, wealth of software and openness but there is a misunderstanding of the desktop. the same goes to distros. It is ok to reuse public components but there should be some feedback.
1. For example the CUPS system does not consistently report job progress on models which have PJL a common open standard interface.
2. There is no public camera layer (like on Windows MacOSX) that steps on the different kernels to provide camera functionality to messengers.
3.There are bugs on the desktop that prevent correct functionality. The end user just believes his/her devices do not work.
4.There are no common device driver layers for BSD or GPL licences (both can coexist for the end user) to help provide a unified device naming/device driver interface. This way we cannot have the same driver patched for different operating systems but only the layer. This has nothing to do with OS and different users can write their own drivers or stacks for the same device and provide functionality. For example Hurd and Syllable (GPL) and Haiku (BSD) can benefit a lot from this approach. they only have to adapt the device layer to their kernels but reuse drivers. In this manner we can have different OS users focusing on fixing bugs of the same driver or write their own driver which will be reused. A healthy ecosystem would bring together Syllable and Solaris developers working on the same GPL driver. Moreover new devices can be supported because of more people free to support them.
5. Push functionality to the user space instead of hiding it to the kernel.
6. Linux is not a panacea it is just a solution to a set of constraints. There can be other solutions to these constraints of the same quality.
7. Encourage uKernel designs.
8. Convergence can be done without merging. People should not fear that using the same components on Linux/BSD means that they are both the same. Instead innovation is encouraged.
9. The above can help the bug fixes of GNOME in BSD propagate to Linux users and vice versa through a truly cross platform design/channel.
Sooner or later QNX will enter the game. Why not use their experience? The Unix wars are over. Live in harmony and peace. The open source model calls for contributions from students, hobyists and companies. Why not use this workforce efficiently? Is it communism? Don’t be shy, yes it is. It is not bad as long as people stay cooperative.