OpenSolaris Developer Preview, Try it!
November 1, 2007 3:32 pm GNOME, Indiana, OpenSolarisToday we released the first milestone for Project Indiana, the OpenSolaris Developer Preview. Before you even read the rest of this blog entry, start your download. The locals of Guam (the last known inhabitable place in the planet to see the final hours of October pass by) are now celebrating, hopefully with some strong alcohol.
I’d like to shout out some “thank yous” right off the bat. Thanks to everyone involved in the various projects that made up this distribution, not just those on opensolaris.org but the wider free and open source community – you guys are my heros, and I strongly value your continued commitment to freedom. I’d also like to thank those projects a little closer to home that we’ve focused on for this first release, caiman, ips, and modernization (and those behind the scenes herding them – Bill, Dan, Kelly & Bonnie). They’ve survived network outages, fires *and* earthquakes to get this out the door on time – awesome! At a personal level I’d like to particularly thank David, Stephen, Dave, Danek, Sanjay and Bart for their continued patience in answering my many questions. And finally, I’d like to thank my wonderful, wonderful team mates Sara, Patrick, Jesse, Derek, Jim, Terri, and most of all Ian. We got there, woo!
Enough of the oscars, show me the software!
The developer preview is only x86 at this time (for sheer practical reasons of wanting to get something out of the door), and should run on a minimum memory requirement of 512Mb on the metal, but also in VMWare. You’ll also notice when you start playing with it –
- It is a single CD download, so much of the software you’d expect to see in Solaris Express is not there, some of which will be available from a network package repository
- It’s built on Nevada b75a
- It is also a LiveCD, allowing you to try before you install on to your disk
- Contains the latest bits of the new Caiman installer, with a significantly improved user experience
- ZFS as default filesystem – NO WAY! WAY
- IPS as the underlying network based package management system (though SVR4 packaging is still available)
- /usr/gnu/bin has been added to the default path
- bash is the default shell
- GNOME 2.20 goodies
This first release is a prototype – some indication that we really are serious about putting this together. It has come out of the proverbial sausage factory with relatively little testing and could contain bugs that could lead to panics, data corruption or other similarly uncomfortable situations. You should probably not run this in your data center.
Download it, try it, but most importantly, tell us about it! As always, we need your help – join us on indiana-discuss (or one of the other specific project aliases). We’re not done, we’re just getting started.
November 1st, 2007 at 4:03 pm
I heard that Solaris will be released under the GNU GPLv3, is that the case? If/when that happens, will OpenSolaris attempt to merge their stuff into Debian?? It would be great to have more than two kernels available in Debian.
November 1st, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Congratulations!
November 1st, 2007 at 4:21 pm
On qemu-kvm I only got to console login. What is the root password? Thanks.
(fwiw, in Fedora we leave the root password blank on live cd’s)
November 1st, 2007 at 4:27 pm
We set up a user ‘jack’ with password ‘jack’ – that should have an RBAC role. The root password is ‘opensolaris’
November 1st, 2007 at 4:30 pm
I appreciate you and indiana project team. pabs, as I know, indiana project is for merging a lot of useful stuff of Linux distribution into OpenSolaris.
November 1st, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Congratulations! Can’t wait for the download to finish.
November 1st, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Thanks Glynn, that did the trick. Oh, and Congratulations on the release!
November 1st, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Good Job!
Go, Indiana, Go!
November 1st, 2007 at 11:03 pm
Congrats! Can’t wait to see a final release.
One question however, are Sun going to be getting involved in betterdesktop.org type projects and create a SLED style enterprise release? I’d really like to see a solaris enterprise desktop which compares to the quality of SLED, with usability improvements and general desktop love.
November 1st, 2007 at 11:03 pm
A hearty congrats, Glynn. It’s been a pleasure.
November 1st, 2007 at 11:21 pm
What is up with the weird license? The Restrictions section is really harsh. And even though Sun’s Java implementeation is now largely distributed under the GPL and we have a full free version as IcedTea you are still trying to restrict people from creating java software :{
I was hoping Indiana was about Free Software, this is a little disappointing.
November 2nd, 2007 at 8:09 am
@Mark: I’ll check with the license gurus about about the restrictions sections – FWIW, Java never made it onto the LiveCD.
November 3rd, 2007 at 6:08 am
Hey, where’s that flying pig mascot?!?
November 7th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Ilho Kim: my question was the other way. Debian is not just a Linux distribution, it is also a Hurd and FreeBSD distribution, and it could also be a Solaris distribution if Nexenta/OpenSolaris were interested.
November 8th, 2007 at 5:03 am
holy crap it really was easy to install 🙂 CONGRATS … and keep going
hey where’s the cheat sheet for linux bsd solaris commandline equivalents 🙂