OpenSolaris 2008.11 Released; TimeSlider, New Package Repositories and A Lot More
posted Thursday, 11 December 2008
| I spent some time loading the latest version of OpenSolaris (2008.11) today. In case you haven't heard OpenSolaris 2008.11 was released. By visiting opensolaris.com you can see and hear the launch videos and also details can be found on the announcement site. Some quick comments on the install - I installed it on my MacBook Pro laptop (within VirtualBox) and it was painless and the new wifi features quickly saw my wifi network. I read Geertjan's |  | comments on it and saw Erwann Chenede's TimeSlider screencast and Roman Strobl's screencast before I started the install. One nice option for people wanting to try it out is the OpenSolaris Learning Cloud Service which allows you to try out new features of OpenSolaris 2008.11 without the hassles of downloading, installing or configuring--all for free. In the Learn part of the site - there are a number of useful discussions, videos, technology introductions and more. The Use part of the site has a bunch of docs detailing the release, including Release Notes, a webcast on upgrading from previous releases, a webcast on using the Package Manager GUI, a webcast on using the command line, access to the OpenSolaris Technical Essentials Guide, a guide on installing the web stack, another guide on DTrace and the Webstack and alot more. The Share section of the site includes forums. Finally the Get section is the place to go for the download. Enough with the places you can go for more information - let's see what has changed. One interesting point - OpenSolaris 2008.11 uses ZFS end-to-end ... meaning it is now bootable. One area that gave me problems before was wifi support and that looks like it has been nicely taken care of. You can read about the new features or improvements in 2008.11 at the What's New site. TimeSlider is a huge and another compelling reason to use OpenSolaris which provides automated backups. I also notice that bootable ZFS is here (see Roman Strobl's comment). So many new and improved features, new package repositories with vast amounts of open source software available, NetBeans 6.5 IDE and Eclipse are included, a new print manager, ZFS support for separate read and write caches (ZIL + L2ARC) on such storage devices as solid state disks, big CIFS performance improvements and a lot more - again see the overview site.
Note also that JavaDB 10.4.2.1 (what a version number) is available in OpenSolaris 2008.11 and you can run it as a Solaris service using the Solaris SMF (Service Management Facility). You can find the details at Anders Hatlen's blog.
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