The semi-annual solar cycle is over

Today, the new release of OpenSolaris 2008.11 will be officially presented, and in this post I will tell you what it is and why it is needed.

The main idea behind the development of OpenSolaris was to provide the developer community with access to the Solaris OS source code and to develop this operating system based on open-source principles. The ears of Solaris grow from the original Unix, so some elements are different from what Linux users are used to. But nevertheless, in any scenario it is better than Windows :)

And the first question that has arisen to me is what is in it, what would not be in Linux and why do I need it? so

1. Not many people know, but Solaris is a real-time system right out of the box. Those. Any applications that require real-time mode (telecoms or military systems, for example) can use a general-purpose operating system, rather than a specialized one. That has a positive effect on the integration and ease of support for developing applications. In addition, for the user, switching between application windows is much faster under load.
2. The legacy stability of the software means that the application compiled a dozen years ago for Solaris 7 will work on new versions of OpenSolaris and Solaris without rebuilding. “I don’t have to rewrite the application because some m # $% decided to rewrite the memory management system” (I don’t remember where the quote is :). This moment especially infuriates me in Ubuntu, when after the next kernel update half of the software starts to fall
3. All I need to work - Gnome or KDE, Eclipse or Netbeans, OpenOffice and Firefox, VirtualBox, Mplayer and Stardict - all this is and is available in binary repositories. To be honest, there is no Skype and there is no voice support in SecondLife, but this has to be philosophical - I still use multi-boot for games with games, so not everything is so bad :)
4. Another property that is useful to me personally is a productive file system that does not interfere with the operation of applications. Try running a couple of tar's builds on a few gigabytes on ext3 in the background and browse the web with Firefox while doing this. I have this focus on Ubuntu with 4 gigabytes of RAM. And on OS everything is divided equally - tar'y huddle, the fox shows, the mail is swinging - you really believe in multi-core and multi-threading.
5. The most interesting thing about any * nix is ​​the update. In the OS, it is done using an isolated boot environment that is tied to the snapshot of the file system. Thus, even if everything is broken in the next update, you can roll back to the state of the file system (!) Before the update. But not the way it was done in package distributions - here, let's see what was not installed, and what was installed, we will send it in reverse order to restore, but here it is, something is not restored, AAAAAAAAAA, we all die - rearrange the system.

So, what turned out to be especially important for me in this new release:

1. First of all, 08.11 has really become a distribution kit ready for use. The first version 08.05 came out very raw and I myself very long fucked with it to make it update and work normally. That only costs a glitch with grub, which distorted the whole point of an isolated update :) At 08.11 a huge step forward is seen in how the installation process and the feeling of working with the new system proceed. At some points, it has not yet reached all the Ubuntu footsteps, such as the automatic installation of codecs or command-not-found, but otherwise everything turned out very nice.
2. Secondly, a very handy thing appeared, which I saw only in MacOSX - Time Slider. This is the history of changes in any folder or the entire file system, represented as a slider in the nautilus. How it looks in action can be seen here at about 5:50
3. Ported many utilities from GNU / Linux such as for example top. It will seem strange to someone, then there was no such utility in Solaris, and the analogue is called prstat :-)
4. The Package Manager has been heavily rewrote and updates have been added to the repository. There are several repositories themselves and they are broken down by functional purpose - release updates and critical bugfix, for developers, a repository for automatically compiled applications, etc.
5. As a laptop user, it is very important for me that suspend-resume is now included in the distribution. True, not for all laptop models, but already something. And besides, a very interesting utility ported ( http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/tesla/Work/Powertop/ ) for monitoring the most stressful applications.

In addition, engineers from Intel danced quite a lot over the core to optimize it for their processors and especially for Core i7. I can say that I am so old that I remember the Turbo button on the system blocks. Therefore, it became a revelation to me that this mode will appear again in new processors. Well, now at least its inclusion will be automatically http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEpxiPxvdx0 :)
')
This is basically what hooked me up specifically and what I would love to use. A big spoiler of change lies here http://www.gnome.org/~gman/opensolaris-whats-new/ .

Download the LiveCD, from which you can later install, here: http://opensolaris.org/os/

The site dedicated to the release of the new version will be available here after 17 hours in Moscow.