August 03, 2010 -- Last week we reported on the Illumos project that may be a fork of OpenSolaris coming out of the OpenSolaris community being shafted by Oracle. Not many details were known at that time, but now the Nexenta-sponsored Illumos project has formally introduced itself.

Illumos is not intended to be a fork of the OpenSolaris operating system itself and distributed as a binary distribution (like what "Project Indiana" emerged as a binary distro when Ian Murdock joined Sun Microsystems a few years back) but a base for other vendors to build upon. While there are not as many OpenSolaris distributions as there are Linux distributions, the Solaris world has Nexenta, the Nexenta-based StormOS, BeleniX, SchilliX, and a couple others. Should any of these projects lose faith in Oracle or the OpenSolaris code-base were to disappear, they can switch to using Illumos.

The major goals for the Illumos project are to be a self-hosting SunOS derivative, to be fully open-source, maintain 100% ABI compatibility with Solaris, legally usable by upstream, no corporate dependencies, and to be a basis for other OpenSolaris distributions. Illumos is initially targeting x86 and x86_64 (amd64) support while SPARC support should be here "really soon" according to their press slides.

What the dozen or so developers working on Illumos have accomplished so far is replacing some of the closed-source bits of OpenSolaris with their own open-source replacements (contrary to the name, OpenSolaris is not fully open-source). Among the parts of the OpenSolaris stack they have replaced with their own open-source solutions have been the closed bits in libc, critical closed-source utilities, and some drivers. Illumos currently boots, but a few closed-source bits still need to be replaced.

Coming up soon the Illumos developers plan to work on a NFS/CIFS lock manager, full kcf module/daemon (the crypto framework), trusted extensions, many more drivers, and further dependency resolution.

Illumos hopes to be the truly open-source OpenSolaris that is maintained by the community and not dependent upon a corporation (though Illumos is currently sponsored and worked on by Nexenta developers) that Nexenta and other OpenSolaris distributions can use when building up their operating system. Illumos hopes to not be a competitor to Oracle OpenSolaris but rather collaborate and contribute upstream, but if Oracle does decide to further disregard the OpenSolaris community, there is now an alternative.

More on this project can be found at Illumos.org.

July 20, 2010 -- Since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems last year, the future of the Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems have been called into question especially as the OpenSolaris 2010.1H release was missing and has been that way for months now with no official communication from Oracle. A new OpenSolaris release hasn't come in more than a year and we still are left wondering if or when it will arrive. Even the OpenSolaris Governing Board is out of the loop and they may abandon the cause in August if Oracle doesn't make their OpenSolaris intentions clear and appoint a liaison. This evening though is one of the first signs that Oracle may let the OpenSolaris operating system live on with their support.

Not only has the OpenSolaris 2010 stable release been missing for months, but so has the OpenSolaris development snapshots. While under Sun Microsystems' control, there were bi-weekly snapshots of Solaris Nevada (the codename for the next-generation Solaris OS to eventually succeed Solaris 10) and this new code was then pulled into new OpenSolaris preview snapshots available at Genunix.org. The stable releases of OpenSolaris are based off of these Nevada builds. However, there haven't been any new bi-weekly builds since build 134 in early March and that arrived nearly a month after build 133. OpenSolaris 2010.03/2010.04 was supposed to be based off of a later revision to either build 133 or 134. The new evidence we have this evening is that OpenSolaris may live on under Oracle as they are working on Nevada Build 145.

As the first email of its kind in months, Alan Coopersmith who is a known X.Org contributor and longtime Sun Microsystems employee now working for Oracle, has written a new email entitled "IPS distro-import changes needed for X packages for nv_145." Alan immediately began this public email by saying, "Just when you thought you'd never see another one of these biweekly mails...."

The rest of Alan's email goes on to talk about the X.Org packages in Nevada build 145 that need to be updated. Beyond the technical details for the X IPS package changes needed, no details were given about when we may actually see an OpenSolaris Nevada Build 145 released publicly or the stable release of OpenSolaris 2010.XX. Unless Oracle is just misguiding their employees about the future of Sun's OS or letting them waste more resources on the OS while knowing it will be killed off, it looks like we may see Oracle starting to get behind OpenSolaris.

For now we can only hope Oracle issues an official statement shortly, which would ideally be backed by the long-awaited Oracle OpenSolaris 2010 release.

June 30, 2010 -- Once upon a time the successor to OpenSolaris 2009.06 was supposed to be OpenSolaris 2010.02 and then it became OpenSolaris 2010.03 with a release date in March and then who knows what happened. There hasn't been an update to the OpenSolaris operating system now in a year nor has there been any communication at all to developers or end-users by Oracle about their plans after taking over Sun Microsystems. All indications were that Oracle would at least deliver an OpenSolaris update in 2010'1H, but it looks like that won't happen.

Within the BugZilla the release was known as "OpenSolaris 2010.1H", but all of its blocking bugs are cleared and today is the end of the first half of the year. At OpenSolaris.com is still the 2009.06 release. 12+ months between releases is a far cry from the Project Indiana days where the intent was for a six-month release cycle -- something that Sun had pretty much achieved up through the 2009.06 release. The latest OpenSolaris Developer Preview release is Build 134 and it was released at the beginning of March, which used to be updated on a bi-weekly basis.

March 28, 2010 -- OpenSolaris 2010.03 was supposed to have been released earlier this month (in fact, originally it was supposed to be known as OpenSolaris 2010.02 and released in February, but then it slipped to early March). However, March is coming to an end and there still is no sign of OpenSolaris 2010.03. Oracle, which now owns Sun Microsystems, has also not provided us with any comment on the situation nor have they addressed the OpenSolaris community and their discussion.

We've known that Oracle is to make some Solaris / OpenSolaris changes, but all signs have been that they would move forward with the OpenSolaris 2010.03 release in March as planned. OpenSolaris 2010.03 will supersede OpenSolaris 2009.06 that was released last June.

OpenSolaris 2010.03 is to be based upon a revision to OpenSolaris Build 134. A preview build of OpenSolaris Build 134 was made available at the start of this month over at Genunix.org, but no new builds have been made available since -- either for OpenSolaris Build 135 or the 134a that the final release will likely be based upon.

There's still a few days left for Oracle to deliver this release on time, otherwise we may be looking at OpenSolaris 2010.04. We are awaiting official comment on the matter.

February 22, 2010 -- Since Oracle finished its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, there have been many changes to the open-source projects that were once supported under Sun now being discontinued by Oracle and significant changes being made to the remaining open-source products. One of the open-source projects that Oracle hasn't been too open about their intentions with has been OpenSolaris. Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) already closed up last month and there hasn't been too much information flowing out about the next OpenSolaris release, which is supposed to be known as OpenSolaris 2010.03 with a release date sometime in March.

This morning on the zfs-discussion and indiana-discuss mailing lists there has been talk about what exactly is the future of OpenSolaris within Oracle. On the Sun domain, Oracle has already published a new web-page stating the end of service life for OpenSolaris.

OpenSolaris 2009.06 is the latest official OpenSolaris release, but even that release is no longer covered under their general availability (GA) support phase without any new release being available. Though at the bottom of the page is a note that Oracle is still reviewing Sun's information and is coming to a decision regarding the product's road-map and future offerings.

As one former Sun customer points out, the subscription link for OpenSolaris has been removed. George Shepard formerly of Sun and now with Oracle has iterated that Oracle is indeed planning on changing the support model for OpenSolaris, but no announcements are yet available.

July 22, 2009 -- For those of you following the latest kernel developments, the Linux 2.6.31-rc4 kernel has just been released. This fourth release candidate for the Linux 2.6.31 kernel brings fixes for some bigger bugs that were discovered in the past week. These bugs, which are now corrected in 2.6.31-rc4, impacted binutils, ccache, and the compiler. Beyond that there are some small bug fixes and other work going on within the Linux 2.6.31-rc4 kernel.

The Linus Torvalds release announcement for the Linux 2.6.31-rc4 kernel can be read here.

February 01, 2009 -- Introduced in Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and then last week as a Windows XP update was exFAT. exFAT, or the Extended File Allocation Table, is Microsoft's new file-system for use on mobile devices like large USB flash drives. exFAT addresses the file-size and partition size limitations of Microsoft's FAT32 file-system and brings other improvements to the table as well, albeit it's proprietary. No read or write support for exFAT has yet to enter the mainline Linux kernel, but a set of read-only patches have emerged.

Started by a kernel mailing list thread asking about exFAT / FAT64 support for Linux, a developer had shared he wrote his own patches. Microsoft hasn't released the technical specifications to exFAT, but he was able to reverse-engineer a Windows Vista disk image of exFAT.

This Linux exFAT support is far from perfect and there is no file-system write support, yet, but at least it's a start. Granted, if you don't have to deal with exFAT formatted media, you can use another file-system like EXT4, Tux3, or Btrfs for your high-capacity removable media.

December 05, 2008 -- Seven months after the release of OpenSolaris 2008.05 (a.k.a. Project Indiana) its successor was finally released earlier this week. OpenSolaris 2008.11 was released on Tuesday with many updated packages and new features. To see how this new work has affected the performance of Sun's OpenSolaris operating system, we have benchmarked both releases through some different tests.

November 22, 2008 -- The first release candidate for OpenSolaris 2008.11 came out two weeks ago and now Sun has announced the availability of the second release candidate. OpenSolaris 2008.11 RC2 is based upon the Solaris Nevada Build 101b code-base and new packages include the NVIDIA Cg Toolkit and visual panels for MySQL and Sysid. The release announcement for OpenSolaris 2008.11 RC2 can be read on the mailing list.

OpenSolaris 2008.11 was planned for release in November, hence its name, but it doesn't look like it will actually be delivered this month. According to the public relations firm contracted by Sun, this next OpenSolaris release will arrive in "early December" (at some point after the 2nd of December). However, it doesn't look like it will be renamed to OpenSolaris 2008.12.

November 08, 2008 -- For those interested in helping out Sun Microsystems with testing out the near-final build of OpenSolaris 2008.11, its release candidate is now available. This build is based upon Build 101a of the open-source OpenSolaris code-base. We previously offered a preview of OpenSolaris build 99.

The OpenSolaris 2008.11 release candidate announcement and Torrent download links can be found on the OpenSolaris mailing list. If you want to give us a hand, you can also test out OpenSolaris 2008.11 with Phoronix Test Suite 1.4 "Orkdal".

October 31, 2008 -- It was one year ago to the day that the first developer preview of Sun Microsystem's Project Indiana was released and was called OpenSolaris, the same name that Sun had been using for their open-source Solaris code repository. Since then we have had the official release of OpenSolaris 2008.05 and version 2008.11 of OpenSolaris has been under development but is scheduled to be officially released in November.

October 08, 2008 -- For those of you interested in running OpenSolaris on Sun's old hardware or new SPARC hardware such as the UltraSPARC T2 (Niagara 2), it will be possible starting early next year. Sun's Tim Cramer has announced they've begun work on bringing this open-source Solaris-derived desktop distribution to their SPARC architecture, which is coming almost a year after the first Project Indiana preview release.

Sun is targeting the SPARC port for a Q1'09 release and at this time they're still determining which generation of the SPARC architecture to focus on for their initial release. Tim Cramer's message can be read on indiana-discuss. Meanwhile, we're nearing the 100th build of Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) and the next release of OpenSolaris, OpenSolaris 2008.11, is due out next month.

July 30, 2008 -- Earlier this month we had provided a first-look at OpenSolaris 2008.11 by using an early version that was based upon the Solaris Express Community b93 code-base. Aside from the updated packages, there wasn't much to differentiate 2008.11 from the inaugural OpenSolaris 2008.05 (http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=12269) release. However, a few more details are now available on what Sun hopes to accomplish with OpenSolaris 2008.11 due out this November.

Glynn Foster and other Sun representatives have been working on the "problem statement" for this next version of the OpenSolaris operating system. The statement in full can be read at OpenSolaris.org while below are a few points that had caught our attention.

- OpenSolaris 2008.11 will introduce a distribution constructor. The OpenSolaris Distribution Constructor sounds like it will be quite similar to Fedora's Revisor program for being able to "spin" a custom ISO of packages depending upon your needs. In the problem statement, a use-case for this program would be to create a derivative OpenSolaris operating system geared for a network storage appliance.

- OpenSolaris 2008.11 will have SPARC support. While Solaris and SPARC are closely bundled, OpenSolaris has only been supported on x86 and x86_64 architectures up until now. There will, however, not be a SPARC LiveCD using Project Caiman for this build.

- With the OpenSolaris Image Packaging System (or IPS for short) a number of improvements are planned. Among the areas are making it easier for a user to create their own IPS packages, generate an IPS repository, a GNOME applet for notifying the user when IPS network updates are available, and a web-based viewer for IPS repositories.

- An OpenSolaris 2008.11 goal is to support at least 50% of the currently supported wireless drivers should be able to support 802.11n WiFi. With that, there should be OpenSolaris network drivers for at least half of the top 10 popular (both wired and wireless) network devices.

- OpenSolaris 2008.11 will hopefully be updated to GNOME 2.24 and will ship with Firefox 3.0.

- GNOME will continue to be the default desktop environment for OpenSolaris, but Sun Microsystems is interested in having KDE 4.0 (well, KDE 4.1) available as an alternate desktop that could be installed through IPS packages.

- A GUI for updating ZFS file-system snapshots as well as the ability to browse these archived snapshots and move them to a remote destination.

- A graphical interface to connect/disconnect to wired and wireless networks automatically and manually. This GUI would also facilitate the setting up of basic profiles for preferred networks. Note to Sun: Please just use NetworkManager!

- A typical developer stack should be available for installation from a network IPS repository (read: not on the CD). This includes the libraries and build utilities for C, C++, Java, C#, Python, Ruby, and Perl through GCC. For integrated development environments they are planning on Sun Studio, Netbeans, and Eclipse. DTrace should also be available.

July 03, 2008 -- OpenSolaris 2008.05 was released just shy of two months ago, but already its ISOs are "out of date" with the rate of development with the OpenSolaris community and new Solaris Express Community Edition (or also known as "Solaris Nevada") builds coming out on a bi-weekly basis. Granted, once an installation has occurred a user is able to update using Project Indiana's Image Packaging System (IPS). However, we've learned that in the near future Sun will be providing updated ISOs of OpenSolaris 2008.05.

In a response to a user inquiry, Sun's Sanjay Nadkarni has stated they plan to deliver an ISO based upon Build 93. At the moment, SXCE Build 91 is the latest-and-greatest build Build 92 should be out at any time now with b93 to follow later this month. Sanjay's one-sentence message can be found on the indiana-discuss mailing list. Sun's Glynn Foster adds that the ISO re-spin will likely be released sometime in August (mailing list message).

While on the topic of OpenSolaris, there is another reminder. Normally around this time we'd be getting ready for an updated quarterly release of Solaris Express Developer Edition, but instead this month SXDE will be shutting down. According to Sun's plans, the SXDE 1/08 website will be shutdown this month and all users will be redirected to the OpenSolaris project. Farewell to Solaris Express Developer Edition...

The next major release of OpenSolaris has been codenamed "Project Jericho" and it is expected to be called OpenSolaris 2008.11 and will be released later this year (November is their target). Later this month at OSCON 2008 we'll hopefully hear more on Sun's Solaris/OpenSolaris road-map.

May 07, 2008 -- A new build of Solaris Express Community Edition has been released today. SXCE Build 87 brings a few updates that have been brewing in the OpenSolaris community within the past few weeks and is the first release since OpenSolaris 2008.05. Most interesting with this release -- if you're using ATI hardware -- is the update against xf86-video-ati 6.8.0.

AMD does not provide any binary "Catalyst" driver for Solaris, so the xf86-video-ati driver is the primary option for those using Radeon or FireGL hardware. Earlier this year though, the RadeonHD driver was pulled into OpenSolaris for SXCE, SXDE, and Project Indiana. The RadeonHD driver in OpenSolaris is an option for those using Radeon X1000 "R500" or Radeon HD 2000/3000 "R600" graphics processors.

Version 6.8.0 of the xf86-video-ati driver was released back in February but it takes the OpenSolaris community some time to adopt the changes. In this new release, the open-source driver adds initial R500/600 support, all included drivers now use libpciaccess, restructuring of the ATI wrapper, initial Render acceleration support for the R300/400 GPUs, and an array of other improvements.

Other X-related changes in OpenSolaris can be found in the Solaris Nevada b80-89 change-log. The SXCE Build 87 release announcement can be read at OpenSolaris.org.

May 05, 2008 -- Taking place at CommunityOne 2008 (as part of Sun's JavaOne conference), Sun has released the much-anticipated OpenSolaris 2008.05 "Project Indiana" operating system. This open-source Solaris OS can be downloaded from OpenSolaris.com (not to be confused with the .org that is for the development community). You can read our review of OpenSolaris 2008.05 here. Project Indiana started out with just a lot of hopes, but in the end it's turned out to be an excellent desktop based upon Sun technologies found in Solaris.

April 24, 2008 -- In early February, Sun Microsystems had released a second preview release of Project Indiana. For those out of the loop, Project Indiana is the codename for the project led by Ian Murdock at Sun that aims to push OpenSolaris on more desktop and notebook computers by addressing the long-standing usability problems of Solaris. We were far from being impressed by Preview 2 as it hadn't possessed any serious advantages over a GNU/Linux desktop that would interest normal users. However, with the release of OpenSolaris 2008.05 "Project Indiana" coming up in May, Sun Microsystems has today released a final test copy of this operating system. Our initial experience with this new OpenSolaris release is vastly better than what we had encountered less than three months ago when last looking at Project Indiana.

April 16, 2008 -- Long before Sun's Project Indiana came about, BeleniX has been one of our favorite GNU/Solaris distributions. BeleniX has been a LiveCD based upon OpenSolaris, but with yesterday's release of BeleniX 0.7 it is now a source-level derivative of the Project Indiana blend of OpenSolaris. Today we're taking a quick look at this new release.