[geeks] FYI - OpenSolaris 2008.05 released

[Mark]

On 6 May 2008, at 01:16, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> Bill Bradford wrote:
>> On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 06:22:11PM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>>> It's being "shipped" as a Live CD, and it installs after starting  
>>> up on
>>> the PC - I'm interested in the ZFS root filesystem...
>> Unfortunately x86-only.
>> I really wish they had chosen a different name - "OpenSolaris" was  
>> really
>> the name for the Solaris open-source effort, and using that as the  
>> straight
>> name for a single OpenSolaris-based distribution (even if it's Sun's
>> official one) is just going to lead to confusion.
>> Bill
>
> I haven't used it yet.  Is it better than the old Solaris x86?  Can  
> one install it with a non-Gnome desktop?  I have a new-to-me dual- 
> Xeon main fileserver (with 3.6TB of disk) to bring up, but,  
> sorry'n'allthat, unless Linux's nfsd has improved a heck of a lot  
> since the last time I tried to use it, I want Solaris on it.

I'd have thunk they'd use the Sun NFS daemon. seeing as Sun have a  
defined standard for NFS compatibility. I agree, the Linux version of  
NFSd is a complete pile of horse manure. I tend to use NetBSD or OS X  
for serving off NFS, because they are easier to handle (in OS X's case  
you do need Leopard though).

I'd have thunk also if they are going down the Linux-like route it  
ought to be semi-straight-forward to compile KDE for OpenSolaris  
maybe? Or XFCE, or whatever you fancy? I dunno, I guess the community  
support is a touch limited atm.

TBH if you a re using it on a Server I'd go for the industry strength  
Solaris 10 05/08 strain. OpenSolaris 05/08 is really designed as a  
Linux-esque desktop/enthusiast OS. Jonathan Schwartz says the strategy  
was to get in on the 'bottom-upwards' trend of techies using Linux at  
home and learning how useful it was so deploying it at $work, or  
something like that, I guess he's hoping that people will do the same  
with OpenSolaris to Solaris 10.

I'm grabbing it to try on my Java Workstation, but the download keeps  
stalling on me. Most annoying!

-- 
Mark Benson

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