Unixster

The deal is done. Oracle now owns Sun. Oracle’s main message to Sun’s customers seems to be "Don’t worry, be happy." That’s not easy when Oracle is not explaining in any detail what it will be doing with open-source software offerings like MySQL, OpenOffice and OpenSolaris. In general, we know that Sun’s software product catalog will be cut back and that many Sun staffers will soon be laid off. Historically, when Oracle acquires a company, deep cuts are the rule. For example, Oracle fired about 5,000 workers after acquiring PeopleSoft. This time around, Oracle is saying that there will be only about a thousand layoffs. In particular, although no one is going on record, it’s feared that Sun’s open-source groups will take the brunt of these cuts.

Well, I figured that I should take an opportunity to introduce a few opensource OSs that really haven’t been in the lime light much. We all know about Linux and many of us also know about Darwin and BSD. Still some know about OpenSolaris. Which ever ones you know or don’t here’s a chance to get the scoop.

While Sun Microsystems puts their weight behind the GNOME desktop environment for Solaris and OpenSolaris, there are developers that do work on providing a quality experience for KDE on OpenSolaris. However, getting KDE to run on a clean OpenSolaris installation can require building KDE from source and taking various other steps. Fortunately, for KDE fans, there is now the Korona distribution, which brings KDE 4.3 as the default desktop environment to an OpenSolaris stack.

Mark your calendars, for 12 August 2009 deserves to be remembered for all eternity. At least it was an important day for me. Because one thing that I was missing on OpenSolaris and in the GNOME desktop environment was GNOME-DO. This application was one of many that truly made me efficient in a GNU/Linux environment. It is unfortunate though that a package of it does not exist in OpenSolaris. Even when installing Mono (pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib) and all the necessary components, I still had problems building the package. One day I may revisit that but in the meantime I decided to concentrate on building and installing the gnome-launch-box. For the most part, gnome-launch-box will do all that I really need it to do.

Sun’s Glynn Foster has announced today on the OpenSolaris Forums that they will be discontinuing the Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) builds. For quite some time now, Sun has been providing bi-weekly updates of the latest (Open)Solaris code in the form of an ISO for those interested in testing out the latest work on this operating system.

What is it that makes Microsoft’s products sell? Why is it that Microsoft seems to reign supreme in our microcomputer industry? Sure, we all know that IBM and Linux are strong in the research field, and we know that Solaris had a strong following in some areas as well, but niches aren’t what dominate markets. Niches are just small pockets that concentrate on specific things. We all have a tendency to think that Scientific Linux is a niche distribution, or that tomstrbt is a niche distribution… in reality Linux is a niche operating system. The same can be said about the BSDs, and Solaris, and AIX, and HPUX, and V7×86 (ad inifitum). When we look at Macintosh, there is a tendency to think that Microsoft isn’t impenetrable. Why does Macintosh do well when Linux does not? After all, Linux offers more hardware support than any other OS. Well, the answers are blazingly obvious and simple.

For what seems like forever using Wine (The Windows compatability layer) on Solaris was an absolute pain. There was once a time when you had to compile it by hand, then Vit Hrachovy & Apostolos Syropoulos & Albert Lee started producing SVR4 packages that made installing as easy as “pkgadd -d winepackage”. <br /><br /> Since then Brandon Barker has pushed the latest stable release of Wine into the contrib IPS repository which integrates well with the new software management architecture for OpenSolaris.

Ever since I started working with OpenSolaris (release 2008.05 to build 118: 2010.02), I have been suffering through some of the longer load times. While the distribution is maturing fairly well and quick, the boot times are just horrible. And to my understanding the culprit is ZFS. OpenSolaris utilizes ZFS as its default file system. On top of that, one thing that I still cannot understand is why GRUB defaults its timeout value to 60 seconds. 60 seconds! Why!?! Who needs this 60 seconds and/or who wants to be constantly annoyed to hit enter to the default kernel image, initiating the boot process? Either way, this can be modified. On OpenSolaris, editing the GRUB boot options is a little different from your traditional UNIX/Linux operating system. Note that this article is for Intel architectures and not SPARC.

After writing my article on The Linux RAM Disk for Linux+ Magazine and also after writing a very generic Linux RAM disk block device module, I decided to play around with the concept of RAM disks on OpenSolaris 2009.06. I must admit that this was actually a very great learning experience. One that I wish to share with the reader. Note that this post will be separated into two section: (2) tmpfs and (3) ramdiskadm.