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

Differences with Linux and Windows

Even though OpenSolaris is free and open source similar to Linux, it is different in many ways. Unlike the Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE, which are based on the Linux kernel, OpenSolaris is based on the Solaris kernel. This makes OpenSolaris fundamentally different from all the Linux based operating systems.

But both OpenSolaris and Linux (and many other Unix like operating systems) are POSIX compliant (which is an industry standard for Unix based OS) and so thousands of applications which run on Linux based operating systems, also run on OpenSolaris. Moreover, OpenSolaris has many unique features, which are not available on any flavour of Linux. For example, while Linux uses Ext3 or Ext4 file systems, OpenSolaris uses the ZFS file system which is a much more advanced file system. We will discuss ZFS in greater detail later in the book.

OpenSolaris also provides developer tools like DTrace, which allow programmers and system administrators to probe the inner functioning of an applications while it is still running. DTrace will be covered in details as well. Differences between Linux and OpenSolaris exists in licensing as well.

While Linux is released under the GNU Public License (GPL), OpenSolaris is released under Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). CDDL is based on Mozilla Public License (MPL) and unlike GPL, which is a project based license, CDDL is a file based license. This allows users and developers a greater level of freedom and permits both closed source as well as open source components to co-exist in the same project.

OpenSolaris is very different from the operating systems of the Microsoft Windows family. As stated earlier, unlike Windows, OpenSolaris is free and open source. Even though it is possible to run some of the applications developed for Windows using WINE, OpenSolaris and Windows are different in most of the technological aspects.

Getting familiar

Like every other popular operating system, OpenSolaris has a GUI, which is based on GNOME. Thousands of applications, including the most popular open source applications Firefox, OpenOffice and Thunderbird have been ported to OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris is distributed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which is a
variant of the Mozilla licence used by Firefox. Because many applications, including the GNOME desktop environment, are common with various Linux distributions, you can confuse OpenSolaris to be yet another Linux distribution. However, OpenSolaris is not Linux! There are many unique features available on OpenSolaris that sets it apart from all the other operating systems such as Linux and Windows.

The term OpenSolaris can also have other meanings to depending on the context it is used. OpenSolaris is used to refer to:

• An operating system code base that is originally based on Sun's proprietary Solaris operating system.
• An open source development project.
• The community of users and developers who contribute to the project OpenSolaris.
• A free binary distribution.
  

Throughout this book, we'll be referring to the last meaning in the list, the term OpenSolaris means a free binary distribution of the OpenSolaris software that is available for redistribution under the terms of the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), unless otherwise stated.

Getting started

OpenSolaris is the binary distribution of a mature, free and open source operating system, based around Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system. The history of OpenSolaris begins in 1983 (27 years ago!) when Sun released its own flavour of Unix named SunOS 1.0. In June 1992, SunOS was renamed Solaris.

With millions of installations all around the globe, Solaris is one of the most popular flavours of Unix in the world and is known for its scalability, security and stability. In 2005, Sun decided to open source the code base of Solaris and as the result of it, OpenSolaris was born. OpenSolaris is available for the x86 platform as well as the SPARC platform. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available and can be downloaded from http://www.opensolaris.com.