Installation of Opensolaris

OpenSolaris is a LiveCD distribution, and so, you can try out OpenSolaris without actually installing it on your hard disk. Once you decide to install it on your physical drive, or inside a virtual machine, you can use the same LiveCD to do so, all with the click of a mouse. In this section, we will describe how to use the LiveCD and how to install OpenSolaris on to your computer.

Using the LiveCD
The LiveCD can be used by booting your computer through it. Put the LiveCD into your machine's CD drive and reboot. Once the machine boots from this CD you'll see a GRUB screen.

In the GRUB screen, select the first boot option (OpenSolaris 2009.06). The system will start booting from the LiveCD and soon you'd be asked to select the keyboard layout and language. In order to boot from the CD you might need to change the boot order of your machine by modifying the BIOS settings. Please make sure your BIOS is configured to boot from CD before it boots from the hard disk.

When prompted, press [Enter] to accept the default values for keyboard (en_US) and language (English) and you would soon see the OpenSolaris desktop. After selecting keyboard layout and language, you will get a prompt which says console login. Please do not enter anything here. Wait for the GUI, to load automatically. Once the GNOME desktop is running, you will see the three icons on the desktop – Device Driver Utility, Getting Started With OpenSolaris, and Install OpenSolaris. You can use Device Driver Utility to scan your computer and see if all the device drivers are present or drivers for some devices are missing. Unless the drivers for some critical devices, like the graphics adapter are missing, you can go ahead with the installation.

What's new in 2010.03?

The first release of OpenSolaris came out in May 2008 and was released as OpenSolaris 2008.05. The most recent release is OpenSolaris 2009.06 which was released in June 2009. The next release of OpenSolaris is scheduled to come out next month in March 2010. Many improvements were introduced in OpenSolaris 2009.06 which enhanced its usability and features. Some of the interesting new features of OpenSolaris 2009.06 are:

Multimedia With Codeina And Elisa: Codeina is a utility to allow users to install additional media plug-ins. GStreamer-based media applications will auto detect when users try to play a media file for which there is a plug-in available from the on-line Fluendo store, and will step the user through the process of downloading and installing the plug-in. Some plug-ins are free and some are available for a fee. For the first time on OpenSolaris, Elisa, the free and open source media centre is now available, connecting the internet to an all-in-one media player. Watch your photos with previews and nicely animated slide shows. Browse the internet, with everything from Flickr to YouTube and other popular internet services.

Package Manager: The Package Manager has received a number of improvements particularly around start-up performance and the user experience of the application. Package Manager now has a new start-up page, along with improvements to the search functionality that allows search across multiple repositories. Additionally, OpenSolaris 2009.06 brings a new MIME association (.p5i) to allow single click installs while browsing the web, which is quite unique to OpenSolaris.

Greater Windows interoperability with OpenSolaris CIFS: OpenSolaris CIFS (Common Internet File System) service now includes many new features such as host-based access control which allows a CIFS server to restrict access to specific clients by IP address, ACLs (access control lists) on shares, and clientside caching of offline files and synchronization when reconnected. There are many more innovative features that has been introduced into OpenSolaris 2009.06. Visit http://www.opensolaris.com/learn/features/whats-new/200906/ to
learn more on what else in new in OpenSolaris 2009.06. The next version of OpenSolaris will be available in March 2010 and apart from an updated GNOME (GNOME 2.28), it will have many new feature updates in IPS, ZFS and Networking. Check out www.thinkdigit.com/opensolaris for more on OpenSolaris 2010.03.

Key features

OpenSolaris provides many unmatched features in almost every aspect of its use. For a Desktop User: If you want to use OpenSolaris as a desktop operating system, here are some features which would make many things simple and possible.

Image Packaging System (IPS): Finding, installing and managing applications has never been easier. The Image Packaging System allows users to search applications and safely install them without hassles from various software repositories online. It is also possible to set up local software repositories over a standalone machine or over any local area network (LAN) infrastructure.

Time Slider: Timeslider is a unique feature of OpenSolaris. By utilizing the capabilities of the underlying ZFS file system, Timeslider automatically keeps taking regular snapshots of your files and allows you to access files which you might have deleted or changed just by click of a button. Device Driver Utility: OpenSolaris Device Driver Utility scans all the hardware and peripheral devices attached to the system and alerts the user if device driver for any particular device is not available. It also allows user to submit the details of such device to the OpenSolaris Device Driver support group.

Popular software like Firefox, Thunderbird mail client and the OpenOffice productivity suite are available on the OpenSolaris platform. Funky 3D desktop effects are also possible through the Compiz Visual Effects which comes preloaded with OpenSolaris.

For Developers: The real fun of OpenSolaris is when you use it for development purposes. It provides a very unique set of tools which allow programmers to write better and more optimized programs and debug them easily. It also makes developing and deploying applications easy. Some of the cool features which would appeal developers are as follows.

DTrace: A unique feature of OpenSolaris, DTrace allows you to enable probes on a running application and get to know its inner workings and functioning. There are more than 60,000 probes which can be used to profile an application and new ones get added regularly. We will cover DTrace in detail later in the book. You can also refer to the DTrace Quick Start Guide which is available on the Digit DVD.

Service Management Facility (SMF): SMF is a very easy way of managing various services which run in the background to perform particular tasks. You can enable or disable any service with simple commands and easily deploy your own services. You can learn more on SMF in the Quick Start Guide available at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/selfheal/smf-quickstart.jsp.

Network Virtualisation with Crossbow: You might have heard about creating virtual machines to run operating systems, but OpenSolaris has a unique feature called crossbow, which allows to virtualise the network. You can create multiple virtual Network Interface Cards (NIC), with their own IP and MAC addresses, based on a single NIC of your laptop or desktop and convert your laptop into a server like machine! You can learn more about Crossbow on http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Project+crossbow/.

ZFS File system: The ZFS file system is a revolutionary new file system that fundamentally changes the way file systems are administered, with features and benefits not found in any other file system available today. ZFS has been designed to be robust, scalable, and simple to administer. It is currently said to be the best file system in the world.

Apache MySQL PHP (AMP) Stack: OpenSolaris allows you to install a precompiled and configured AMP development cluster for web application development using PHP and MySQL. You can start your PHP MySQL development in just one click and the best part of AMP on OpenSolaris is that you can use DTrace to debug and profile your PHP applications.

With great developer tools like Netbeans, Sun Studio and Sun Compliers, development becomes very easy on OpenSolaris. Be it web applications using PHP, system programming using C or Desktop applications using Java, OpenSolaris provides impressive tools to the developers. There are many more key features of OpenSolaris and you can learn more about it in the Getting Started with OpenSolaris 2009.06 document which is free to download from http://dlc.sun.com/osol/docs/downloads/minibook200906/en/820-7799-12-doc.pdf and is also available on the Digit DVD