OpenSolaris now available for download
Want to try something new? Sun’s OpenSolaris is now available for download. OpenSolaris is as the name suggests an open source edition of Sun’s flagship Solaris operating system. However in actuality it is quite different. It seems to be aimed squarely to compete as a viable alternative to the more popular Linux distrubutions. To that end it comes on a live CD like Ubuntu.
Among the notable features is the use of ZFS as the default filesystem and also includes the Xen hypervisor for builtin virtualisation support. It also included a package manager with software available from repositories like Ubuntu. I imagine that Sun intend for technology that is included in OpenSolaris to make it upstream into later versions of the venerable Solaris OS.
At the moment I’m downloading the CD and I’m going to install it on a virtual machine for a look see.
No doubt you have guessed that I’m something of a Sun fan and at times I think to myself that this blog is turning very Sun orientated. This is not the case however as I recently upgraded my mail server to Ubuntu 8.04 from 6.06 and I have no intentions of changing that anytime soon. However I recently moved my main site and personal blog over to one of my Sun Blade 2000 workstations. And of course this blog is still powered by Windows and IIS.
Diversity? I’ve heard of it.
Here is an interesting nugget of information for you. The project leader for OpenSolaris is non other than Ian Murdock who was one of the original founders of Debian Linux on which Ubuntu is based.
