OpenSolaris was released a few days ago and I took it for a test drive after work. I've been meaning to write about it but work has been keeping me very busy lately. Before I go into details, I'll summarize what Sun is doing with OpenSolaris. They are creating a distribution targeted for desktop use (at least for now) that will have the latest and greatest software, released twice per year. Servers will still use the old Solaris, who's release cycle is 3+ years. The new distribution has a completely rewritten installer and boots into a working desktop off of a Live CD (like Ubuntu). The old package management system has been enhanced or replaced by Image Packaging System (IPS) which is very much like Debian's apt, but is tightly integrated with ZFS features such as snapshots. IPS can also be used to install packages on other OS's such as Windows.

A few weeks ago I ordered a Sun Ultra 24 workstation to use as my primary workstation for work. One of the reasons I bought it is because I need to gain experience using Solaris for one of my future ventures. It came with Solaris 10 pre-installed which is great for servers, but is too dated for desktop use. A lot of the software is from 2003-2004 such as NetBeans IDE 5.0, Star Office 7, etc. I downloaded Solaris Express Developer Edition to install but aborted once I found out that a new version will be released next week. Solaris Express is where the development of Solaris 11 happens. Twice a year many of the innovations are backported to Solaris 10 in an update release. Solaris Express has the latest versions of all desktop software which is perfect for me.

In the spring of 2008 Solaris Express will be replaced by the first official OpenSolaris distribution from Sun, code named Indiana. Indiana is to Solaris what Fedora is to Red Hat. It is a frequently updated distribution that will become the next version of Solaris every three years. The new Image Packaging System (IPS) will debut in Indiana replacing the old System V packaging system. The old packaging system doesn't know how to resolve dependencies and doesn't use network based package repositories. I think this was one of the last major hurdles in Solaris adoption.

There are a couple of things that I don't like about the Sun Ultra 24. The keyboard is missing the right Ctrl key which is replaced by a "Compose" key. There are a bunch of UNIXy keys on here, such as a black diamond? I use the right Ctrl key + arrow keys to quickly move around text skipping entire words with each key press. Now I have to use the left Ctrl key which requires re-training my "finger memory". The other slight annoyance is that the hard drive makes noticeable sounds every time it reads or writes. Other than that I really like this computer. I'm sure I'll get a good 6-7 years out of it like my last computer.

I also purchased a Cisco 871 router with built-in VPN client, VPN server and QoS features. Our network admin configured it so that my home network is permanently attached to the IJW network allowing me to work from home once I'm in Toronto. I hope to use the QoS features for prioritizing VoIP packets if IJW replaces our old PBX phone system with an Asterisk based PBX.

Today Sun unveiled their next generation UltraSPARC T2 processor which was designed for virtualization. This CPU has already broken two world records for single chip CPUs. I watched the web cast after work and am feeling very inspired. At the beginning of the webcast they showed two full sized server cabinets side-by-side representing relatively current high performance servers from Sun. Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, held a new UltraSPARC T2 processor in his hand and told the audience that this one chip is capable of replacing both cabinets – 64 servers. The T2 is made up of eight cores, each capable of running eight simultaneous threads. That is a total of sixty four simultaneous threads running at 1.4 Ghz each, or 89.4 Ghz total. (The clock speed of SPARC processors is different than x86 processors -- 1.4 Ghz is fast.) Sun says that developers who use the Java platform already have the infrastructure to take advantage of a 64 thread system without having to learn anything new. Solaris 10 and Ubuntu Linux will be the first operating systems capable of running on the T2.

Today my free Solaris Express DVD arrived. The first time I placed my order was six or seven months ago. I think Sun's website said that they were overwhelmed with orders and had to have a new batch of DVDs created. Months later I read about people receiving their DVDs, but mine never came. A few weeks ago I received an email from Sun informing me about their latest batch of Solaris Express Developer Edition DVDs -- a preview of Solaris 11 based on OpenSolaris. I decided to place an order in case my previous order has been deleted. A few weeks later, here it is!

The plan was to install it on my HP DV8000 laptop. Unfortunately once it gets past the Grub boot loader, my keyboard becomes completely useless. I look forward to better driver support in the future. Sadly I can only use Solaris on two of my five computers. Don't worry -- I'll survive :)

I booted the DVD in one of my servers to see if the new installer is being used yet. It is not. I read somewhere that the current installer has not been updated since Solaris 2. The new installer is going to make a huge difference in people's first impressions. I was very impressed with screenshots and an interactive demo. They have put a lot of effort into studying the installation software of many operating systems to determine which features are most successful and intuitive. I would say that the new installer most resembles Ubuntu's installer. You boot from the DVD and get a working Gnome desktop with applications. You can run the installer program which takes you through a wizard. The new package groupings make much more sense. I think if you want to do custom partitioning, your end up using command line tools at this time. They are currently working on improving that part of the installer.

According to this thread, a community member has made the Zimbra messaging and collaboration suite work on native Solaris. He is waiting for the latest release of Zimbra (supposedly soon) before releasing his Solaris installer. I have decided to go with Zimbra instead of Scalix because Scalix does not run on Solaris, and will not install in a Linux branded zone. Zimbra on Solaris is really good news for the Solaris community.

In the fall of 2007 I plan on buying a Sun Ultra 20 M2 workstation with dual 20" LCD screens and Solaris Express Developer Edition for work. I'm going to pay for it because I can't justify the switch from my current workstation and Windows to a UNIX workstation -- I just want to. Since I do all development in Java now, I can move to UNIX. The only two issues I foresee are MS Office 2007 support in OpenOffice/Star Office, and a JNI/C DLL I use. The JNI/C DLL is a proprietary encryption library required for communication with one of our other products. This DLL is only required in one of my Java projects and since it was designed to be distributed, the part that uses the C DLL can be run on a Windows computer. Regarding OpenOffice, I read somewhere that OpenOffice 2.2 has the ability to transform MS Word 2007 documents to ODF and back. I'll have to see how well that works. The other issue with OpenOffice is fonts. Installing the mscorefonts package on your linux distribution solves most font related problems. Star Office (which comes on Solaris) comes with many more standard Windows fonts, and a better dictionary. Hopefully the transition will be simple. I'll always keep my old workstation around in case I need Windows for something.

And lastly, I found out that Compiz runs on Solaris and has been tested with a Sun Ultra 20 M2 workstation. Very cool :) I'll have to make sure to get the NVida 3D card with it so that I can use Compiz. I think it's great that all software that I want to use is available on Solaris. I'll be using: Gnome, Evince, Gftp, Firefox 2, Thunderbird 2, Flash Player 9, Star Office 8, Java 6, NetBeans 6, Sun App Server 9.1/Glassfish 2, Postgres, Gaim, Terminal Server Client/rdesktop, and probably more.

Last week I finished reading my book on Solaris 10. My next step was to create a Solaris Zone to get some experience with it. Zones allow mulitple applications to run in isolation from eachother on the same physical hardware. It's a lot like a virtual machine, except it's not a hardware emulator where you can install any OS on it. I don't really know how it works, but know it involves sharing the kernel, is stable and secure enough for the US DoD, and is faster than other types of virtualizations. Usually all zones you create are Solaris zones but there is something new called Branded Zones (BrandZ) where you can create Linux zones. You can install Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS into it. It's still not quite the same as other virtualization technologies. The Linux kernel calls are passed through to the Solaris kernel for execution. There's no GUI, no device drivers, etc... It does let you run most Linux applications though.

My big plan has been to install the Scalix communication suite in a Linux zone. Scalix only runs on RHEL and CentOS. I learned that BrandZ won't be part of Solaris 10 until Update 4 which isn't out yet. To use it, I had to download Solaris Express Community Edition which is the bleeding edge development build of Solaris 11. I installed it and easily got a Linux zone built and booted. There is one problem though.... BrandZ only supports Linux 2.4 kernels, so I am stuck with CentOS 3.x and can't upgrade to 4.x or 5.x. The Scalix installer tells me that I need to install Postgres 7.4 or newer before it can continue. The only RHEL/CentOS 3.x compatible RPMs I can find are 7.3 and earlier!!! Actually there are newer versions of Postgres for RHEL/CentOS 3.x if you are using x64, but BrandZ doesn't do x64.

What I think really sucks is that with every major version of Linux that is released they change any and every API. This causes many programs to break. There has to be multiple builds of an application for different versions of a Linux. What's worse is that some applications force you to use a distro such as Red Hat because they depend on the versions of libraries installed on that distro. Solaris doesn't have this problem. Solaris is a real Enterprise OS because backwards compatibility is one of Sun's top priorities. A program build on Solaris 2 will run on Solaris 10 without recompiling.

So now what? I can't use Scalix because I can't find a Postgres 7.4 or newer RPM for it? I'll have to see if I can run a binary installer instead of an RPM.

Something else I read was that Sun is no longer paying for development to bring newer versions of CentOS into BrandZ, or to make other Linux distributions work with it. They are working on Xen support using Solaris as a host. BrandZ hasn't been released yet and they seem to be adbandoning development on it! One nice thing about Xen support will be that you can make use of Solaris' fault management monitoring tools with it. Xen seems to be quite popluar in the Linux world; it must be good. Also, it will be one more skill Linux administrators can bring with them when they switch to Solaris :)

I have a few more things to moan about. Solaris' installer lets me customize which packages will be installed, but does not automatically handle dependencies! It tells me what dependencies need to be installed and makes me fix them by hand. Also, I read a PDF where Sun recommends you use the "Everything" software group for production servers so that you get all of the administration tools etc... You also happen to get Star Office 8, games, video and audio players, IM, etc... Those don't belong on a server! I think Red Hat and CentOS also tells people to install everything for production servers.

I'll end this entry with something positive. When I booted into Gnome on Solaris 11 (Nevada), I really liked what they did in this version. There's a new theme that looks very sharp. They are using the latest version of Gnome (2.16!), latest Thunderbird and Firefox, and everything is layed out cleanly. There are some Solaris specific tools for managing SMF services, etc... As long as it works with all of my hardware, I would probably be just as happy using it as a desktop as I am with Ubuntu with the exception of package management. I did see a nice updates manager but since I have the bleeding edge version there were no updates for me to try.