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Solaris 11 Express is out Comments Off on Solaris 11 Express is out

Well, the covers have come off and Solaris 11 Express is out. This is going to come as a shock to any Solaris sysadmin who hasn’t played with OpenSolaris or OpenIndiana.

Out with the old:

  • no more UFS root
  • no more patch* commands
  • SVR4 packaging is still there, but deprecated in favour of IPS
  • no more Jumpstart
  • no more flash archives

In with the new:

  • ZFS everywhere
  • ZFS de-duplication
  • ZFS encryption
  • ZFS diff – see the changes between ZFS snapshots
  • AI (the Automated Installer) is how you’re going to be installing Solaris 11
  • IPS is the default packaging/patching system
  • the root account is now an RBAC role

Solaris 11 Express is basically free for any use other than production. The default IPS repository will be updated with critical bug fixes and security patches (think the old Recommended patch clusters) and there is a support repository, for those who have support contracts, which will have full access to all patches and updates.

Solaris 11 Express also qualifies for Oracle Premier Support. If you have SPARC kit, you’ll need at least OBP version 4.17 to use the Automated Installer (AI), but it looks like you can still use the text installer with older OBP versions.

You can find more details in the Solaris 11 Express FAQ.

snv_151 seems to be the the ON build used, which is a bit newer than snv_147 used for OpenIndiana (the team are working on an oi_148 release at the moment – have a look at the OpenIndiana Wiki)

All in all, Solaris 11 Express looks to be pretty much what was expected. It’s going to be ‘commercial’ OpenSolaris – it was pretty much always my understanding that OpenSolaris would push new features, and that those would be rolled into the Solaris product as and when they matured. Things didn’t quite work out that way over the last few years – OpenSolaris became too new, with too many new features, and with the dropping of Solaris SX:CE, there was no real merging of products going on.

What I want to know is – how will JASS work with the new operating environment?

Bordeaux running on OpenIndiana Comments Off on Bordeaux running on OpenIndiana

The Bordeaux Technology group have today announced they have a build of Bordeaux running on OpenIndiana. Bordeaux is a commercial implementation of WINE, and they provide support contracts and incident support – ideal for corporate environments where supportability of Open Source solutions is an issue.

Bordeaux itself provides support for:

  • Microsoft Office Suite of Applications. Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access
  • Internet Explorer. Web Developers frequently need to run multiple versions of Internet Explorer to compare how a website will look to all users running different revisions of the browser software
  • Consumer Video Games. In many cases these contain copy-protection systems that are impossible to port to another platform. This makes vendors reluctant to invest the capital in acquiring another system that will work on other platforms
  • Adobe Photoshop CS and CS2
  • Custom applications for which replacement is not available or development/purchase of a replacement is not economically feasible when compared to the cost of maintaining the existing application in a legacy emulation environment

To so quickly have a build of commercial software for OpenIndiana is a great endorsement, especially when it’s something as useful as Bordeaux.

You can head over to their store and pick up the Bordeaux for Solaris license for only $25, including support.

Upgrading from OpenSolaris 2009.06 to OpenIndiana 1 comment

I’ve written up instructions for this on the OpenIndiana Wiki, but am still seeing a number of questions on how to do this, so thought I’d stick a quick post up here as well, covering how to upgrade from OpenSolaris 2009.06 to OpenIndiana.

The first thing to remember is that, unlike lesser operating systems, Boot Evironments (BEs) mean that you an upgrade with impunity – if it all goes wrong, you just reboot, select the previous working BE, and carry on.

The majority of people will have OpenSolaris 2009.06, the last OpenSolaris distribution. This release snv_111, which wasn’t the last OpenSolaris project release. Confused? We all are.

The direct upgrade from snv_111 to OpenIndiana is problematic – a lot of things have changed, not least the updates to the packaging system. So this needs to be done in two stages – first, update to snv_134 (which would have become the OpenSolaris 2010.03/05/whatever distribution) and then jump to OpenIndiana (oi_147).

So, the first step is to tell OpenSolaris to look at the snv_134 repository hosted by OpenIndiana:


pfexec pkg set-publisher -O http://pkg.openindiana.org/legacy opensolaris.org

This is a snapshot of Sun’s snv_134 repository – as I’m not sure how long that will hang around, it’s best to go through the OpenIndiana repos instead.

Next, we need to tell OpenSolaris to do an image update – basically, dig through the list of local packages, the list of packages in the new repo, find the updates, and then install them:


pfexec pkg image-update

This will take some time, so head off with a coffee and catch up with the OpenIndiana mailing lists and the IRC channel.

Once image-update has finished, you can reboot your machine. The new BE will have been selected as the default, so your machine should boot straight into snv_134.

Start up another terminal session, and we pretty much do the same thing.


pfexec pkg set-publisher --non-sticky opensolaris.org
pfexec pkg set-publisher -g http://pkg.openindiana.org/dev openindiana.org

Once we’ve setup which repos to use, we then need to tell pkg that we’d prefer to use the OpenIndiana ones:


pfexec pkg set-publisher -P openindiana.org

Then we purge anything old, and do a full image-update:


pfexec pkg uninstall entire
pfexec pkg image-update

Once again image-update will do it’s thing, and at the end you’ll be asked to reboot. You’ll find OpenIndiana now on the boot menu – enjoy!

Note that at every stage, you can reboot, select your old or previous BE from the boot menu, and boot back into a known, working environment. This makes testing updates and new releases much less hazardous, and means it’s very easy to get stuck in and try out OpenIndiana for yourself.

OpenSolaris lives! OpenIndiana announced Comments Off on OpenSolaris lives! OpenIndiana announced

Now that Alasdair has started to spread the news ahead of next week, I can share the details of OpenIndiana.

OpenIndiana is a continuation of the OpenSolaris operating system. It was conceived during the period of uncertainty following the Oracle takeover of Sun Microsystems, after several months passed with no binary updates made available to the public.

The project will be formally unveiled with an announcement next Tuesday.

OpenIndiana is part of the Illumos Foundation, and provides a true open source community alternative to Solaris 11 and Solaris 11 Express, with an open development model and full community participation.

Come along on Tuesday – either in person if you’re in London, or online – and see what OpenIndiana is about, then get involved. If you’ve got OpenSolaris 2009.06 machines you’ll really want to know about this.

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