Solaris 10 06/06 Released!

[RyDogg1]

Solaris 10 06/06 for SPARC/X86/64 has been released officially from Sun. It's available for free to the public.

Here's what's new:

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/whats_new.jsp

Warning to potential newbies, Solaris is not what I would call a place to start out learning Linux/UNIX. Solaris is not considered too user-friendly but Sun's documentation online isn't too bad:

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/prod/solaris.10#hic

Also make sure to check the Hardware Compatibility List for you X86 users:

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/

I plan on upgrading my 03/05 AMD64 machine so I'll keep an eye on this thread to help out...

Good Luck!

 

[jlbenedict]

Nice!

PCI Express support
SATA support
IEEE 1394-based digital camera driver
AGPgart driver for x86 systems
64-bit AMD64/EM64T Support
X86 Platform Support

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Interesting, however I'm more of a desktop user so I'll just watch it from the sidelines.

 

[thesix]

RyDogg1,

It's nice you mention this release here.

However, for the folks here, I would recommend try the latest Nevada (Solaris 11) build which is based on OpenSolaris code, see "Step 3b" in the following link:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/downloads/on/

Nevada has every feature the lastest Solaris 10 has, plus more.
For example, the current Nevada release ( probably "b42a" ) integrated GNOME 2.14.

Nevada is a beta release, but the quality is pretty good, I run it exclusively at home (once I tasted the new features, I can't go back).

The most obvious drawback is, you cannot update integrated packages on Nevada as you do in Solaris 10, you have to download new ISOs and do upgrade when new one comes out (about every two weeks) if you want to stay on the latest. Or you can build the the latest core from source and do what they call BFU.

 

[jlbenedict]

Originally posted by: thesix
RyDogg1,

It's nice you mention this release here.

However, for the folks here, I would recommend try the latest Nevada (Solaris 11) build which is based on OpenSolaris code, see "Step 3b" in the following link:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/downloads/on/

Nevada has every feature the lastest Solaris 10 has, plus more.
For example, the current Nevada release ( probably "b42a" ) integrated GNOME 2.14.

Nevada is a beta release, but the quality is pretty good, I run it exclusively at home (once I tasted the new features, I can't go back).

The most obvious drawback is, you cannot update integrated packages on Nevada as you do in Solaris 10, you have to download new ISOs and do upgrade when new one comes out (about every two weeks) if you want to stay on the latest. Or you can build the the latest core from source and do what they call BFU.

oh wow..
could we get some screenshots, if you dont mind??

 

[RyDogg1]

Originally posted by: thesix
RyDogg1,

It's nice you mention this release here.

However, for the folks here, I would recommend try the latest Nevada (Solaris 11) build which is based on OpenSolaris code, see "Step 3b" in the following link:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/downloads/on/

Nevada has every feature the lastest Solaris 10 has, plus more.
For example, the current Nevada release ( probably "b42a" ) integrated GNOME 2.14.

Nevada is a beta release, but the quality is pretty good, I run it exclusively at home (once I tasted the new features, I can't go back).

The most obvious drawback is, you cannot update integrated packages on Nevada as you do in Solaris 10, you have to download new ISOs and do upgrade when new one comes out (about every two weeks) if you want to stay on the latest. Or you can build the the latest core from source and do what they call BFU.

Great suggestion! I've run a few of these releases in test environments and they are pretty up-to-snuff. I hate having to download new ISO's every few weeks, that can get quite annoying but Sun does use Torrents...

 

[thesix]

Originally posted by: jlbenedict

Originally posted by: thesix

Nevada has every feature the lastest Solaris 10 has, plus more.
For example, the current Nevada release ( probably "b42a" ) integrated GNOME 2.14.

oh wow..
could we get some screenshots, if you dont mind??

I do mind, screenshots tell nothing about the quality of an OS, and you already know what GNOME 2.14 looks like, right? ;-)
Ok, I know it's a fashion, I'll see if I can get anything tonight, no promise.

 

[n0cmonkey]

I'd run it on my ultra 10 if it had more than 128MB of ram.

Maybe if the disk in the ultra1 is big enough.

 

[thesix]

Originally posted by: jlbenedict
oh wow..
could we get some screenshots, if you dont mind??

Here you go!

Hope you have a big screen

 

[SleepWalkerX]

How's ZFS? I'm interested if its just all hype or a serious new filesystem compared to ReiserFS, XFS, and JFS (performance-wise, it seems to include more features then them so I'm not concerned about that).

 

[thesix]

Originally posted by: SleepWalkerX
How's ZFS? I'm interested if its just all hype or a serious new filesystem compared to ReiserFS, XFS, and JFS (performance-wise, it seems to include more features then them so I'm not concerned about that).

I don't think there's much "hype" about zfs' performance on the Internet.
People talk mostly about its functionality and reliability, because those are very obvious.

There was an interesting article on ZFS just the other day, you probably already read it:
ZFS: Ten reasons to reformat your hard drives
I rarely see such entertaining yet technically-correct at the same time articles.
However you notice it doesn't mention performance at all.

The answer is always: depends on what you do.
I'd like to quote a post by Dave Fisk (from Ortera), as I can't put it better myself:

As for ZFS, ZFS changes everything ;-) I think of ZFS as first, a masterpiece of functionality and ease of use. From a performance predictability standpoint however, it is extremely challenging ...
... It will take some time to fully understand it, but I think it will be well worth the effort, it is a remarkable advancement in filesystem technology.

Read his full post here.

 

[jlbenedict]

Originally posted by: thesix

Originally posted by: jlbenedict
oh wow..
could we get some screenshots, if you dont mind??

Here you go!

Hope you have a big screen

Thank you!

I was just curious as to how Gnome was implemented with this. I previously downloaded an older version of Solaris, and couldn't get any window manager to work.

I know Gnome is Gnome, but it still pretty neat that Gnome has been implemented to go along with Solaris.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: SleepWalkerX
How's ZFS? I'm interested if its just all hype or a serious new filesystem compared to ReiserFS, XFS, and JFS (performance-wise, it seems to include more features then them so I'm not concerned about that).

Performance probably isn't the primary concern.