OpenSolaris
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Sun History
OpenSolaris is the open source distribution of Sun Microsystem's Solaris operating system. The OpenSolaris project was started by Sun in June of 2005. It runs on both Sparc and x86 systems, and it has come far in a short amount of time.
Solaris has a long history and has been one of the major operating system developed in the last 20 years. It states it is "The most advanced operating system on the planet" - and this may not be unfounded.
With features such as ZFS, and DTrace, containers and zones (for running virtual machines and other distributions in discreet areas) and the numerous other innovations and projects Sun is currently working on, Solaris may be just that. (Read on for more on these technologies.)
Sun's history of support for Open Source is also quite noteworthy. Have you ever used NFS? An early pioneer in TCP/IP, Sun developed the Network File System which became a standard in the industry and is still widely used today. Open Office, a fantastic Open Source Office Suite, was developed by Sun and given freely long before most people had even heard the word "Linux". And recently Sun's acquisition of MySQL AB and Virtual Box, while allowing both projects to maintain their open source projects, should not be missed.
With OpenSolaris Sun is giving its formidable operating system and its underlying technology to the world. They have spent millions developing it, but see further value in the Open Source model.
Sometimes criticized for not offering all their products under the GPL, that may also change. See this site for some interesting comments from Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz and the possible GPL future of things like ZFS and OpenSolaris http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8524 This is very interesting indeed!
For more information, visit http://www.opensolaris.com/ for the public face of the project or http://opensolaris.org/os/ for the development community site.
Project Indiana
The model of having a commercial, enterprise or a long term support product and a parallel distribution for showcasing or testing new technology is familiar with such things as Red Hat and its Fedora distros and Suse and Open Suse. Similar to that Sun has now launch project Indiana - an OpenSolaris based binary distribution.
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/indiana/
These releases will come out on a 6th month release cycle. They contain features which have become common to Linux distros over the recent years such as a Live CD format. But they also showcase unique Solaris features such as native ZFS file systems and Dtrace.
http://www.sun.com/featured-articles/2007-0731/feature/index.jsp?intcmp=hp2007jul30_indiana_learn
Sun's entrance into the distro market may draw a sneer or two from the Linux crowd - a sort of "little too late" attitude. The idea of Microsoft's entrance to console gaming with the X Box and Apple's similar late arrive to MP3 players comes to mind. A late comer sometimes comes at the perfect time. I certainly see a fair number of iPods these days.
OpenSolaris may not get too much attention at first, but I think Sun intends to change that. And behind project Indiana is an individual well equipped for the job
Ian Murdock & Indiana
Ian Murdock, Sun's chief OS strategist is the force behind OpenSolaris and Project Indiana.
Ian, founder of Debian Linux, is the creator of one of the most popular Linux distriubtions in the world. Ian took a position at Sun and is the man behind these projects. He discusses his move to Sun and involvement in Sun projects on his blog at:
http://ianmurdock.com/2007/03/19/joining-sun/
Why is this that significant? Have you ever used Debian or Ubuntu? What did you think of its apt package management? Exactly.
Some would argue that a distro is as good as its repositories, and clearly Debian excels in this area.
Imagine if Solaris had a truly fluid package manager and you could install software as easily as in Debian.
Well - OpenSolaris is well on the way with its new package manager. Installing Open Office is as simple as running #package install OpenOffice. The same applies for MySQL and about 1,200 other packages.
Of course the number of packages available compared to Linux repositories is slight indeed, but that can certainly change. Perhaps the meteoric rise of Ubuntu will have an equal?
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8703
Still wondering about that name, "Project Indiana"?
Debian was named for Ian and his wife Deborah. They live in Indiana, and Sun's project is "Indiana"
Merging of the Minds
While not a huge fan of OS X there is an interesting bit of technology to note:
When OS X was released for the Intel platform a huge concern for Apple was the ability for Intel based Macs to be able to run all the software which had been developed for the PowerPC Macs. Obviously the whole OS X on Intel initiative would not go far if this flopped and backward compatibility was not maintained. The solution was "Rosetta" - and it was essentially a complete success.
Rosetta was not an emulator or a full-on style virtual machine that ran the older PowerPC apps. Instead, it transparently and dynamically translated the binary at execution time into instructions for the new processor architecture it was now running on. It actually would take the CPU instructions written for one architecture and dynamically translate them to another through a cross platform vitrualization solution using binary translation. Amazingly enough it worked extremely well.
http://www.transitive.com/customers/apple.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitive_Corp.
Apple integrated this with OS X for Intel to the point where the user was essentially completely unaware of it. If they downloaded an app compiled for a PowerPC processor and simply tried to run it on their Intel Mac it actually ran.
Now, while there were some apps that did not run under Rosetta, and there was a performance issue with heady apps like Photoshop, I have to say that I could not believe how well it actually worked.
Interestingly enough, the company that produced Rosetta for Apple also produces products that allows apps compiled for Sparc to run on Solaris x86 platforms.
http://www.transitive.com/products/solsparc_solx86
Now, imagine the same type of thing being done to allow Linux apps to run under Solaris. Transitive already makes products that allow Sparc apps to run on Linux x86 and Itanium platforms. If they made a product to translate the other way it would allow many unmodified Linux apps to run on Solaris.
Other Cool Sun Stuff
If you want to learn some about some very cool things in Solaris and that Sun is doing, you might find the following of interest:
ZFS - Zettabyte File System
You can play with this in Linux and run in under Fuse, or install OpenSolaris and test drive it that way. There are so many interesting things about this it deserves elaboration:ZFS_File_System
Project Crossbow[1]
Sun was a pioneer in TCP/IP and it continues it's work by rethinking network device utiliation to take full advantage of 10 Gigabit ethernet, even in virtualized environments, and maintain QOS with not degredation in performance.
Dtrace
Very, very cool. The crystal ball allowing you to gaze deeply into the internal workings of the kernel and applications Solaris_and_Linux_Dtrace
