Growing the OpenSolaris community

This week, I think, it was a really good week: lots of 'goodies' were published: ZFS, Studio 11, PostgresSQL and Oracle press releases, Nevada build 27. Got as well my new books from amazon.co.uk:
TeX, XML and Digital Typography and Digital Typography using LaTeX. And on top of these things had my birthday anniversary: Im 31 years old now...

Try the new ZFS and have a look on the OpenSolaris community. Experiment with Express and see if you like it. Post your findings ! Sun made a significant effort to build a Solaris community and I think this is really working well.

Being tired of Linux: try Solaris Express !

Nice weekend everyone !

ZFS demo, check it out

A very nice demo made by Dan Price: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/demos/basics/
Check it out !

The ZFS Team sent some word about the ZFS on opensolaris forum. Check it out from this address: http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=3594&tstart=0

Nevada b27 does include ZFS. You better hurry up and start your download !

Cool guys !

Studio 11 free...

Good news for developers: Studio 11 tools are free ! check it out ...

This is a huge step forward after the release in summer 2005 of Studio 10 free for OpenSolaris project. Good work Sun !

References:

http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2005-10/sunflash.20051026.1.html
http://www.sun.com/software/products/studio/index.xml

Sun's Galaxy servers

I have to say the new Galaxy servers from Sun look cool. I wish I could have one or two around to do some tests. I hope more and more folks will turn to use Galaxy AMD Opteron servers instead using Dell.

I am running Solaris... and I like that

Notice: No flames please ! I'm not interested in starting any debate about your favorite OS or why you like Debian distribution or any other Linux based distro.

I would like to share my ideas about Linux based distributions and why I keep using Solaris. More and more folks are talking about Linux showing its merits. There is no such operating system like Linux, but instead is just a kernel developed by a group of people which are publishing their work under: www.kernel.org. Some of these folks are working for different organizations and companies: OSDL, IBM, RedHat, Novell etc. A kernel cannot be very useful without the entire collection of tools and utilities around it: the distribution, or simple the distro. Such distros are: Fedora, SLES, Gentoo, Debian etc. Behind these distributions are individuals or even commercial companies hiring people doing the work. Example being here: RedHat, Novell. Some of these distros have guys working in QA by testing their bits in some other cases nobody does that. So a very diverse and big community around Linux.

I do believe Linux based systems can easily coexist with Solaris and other systems: OpenBSD, Windows, NetBSD, FreeBSD etc. However I hear more and more talking and saying: just replace this with Linux. It would just make your life so easy and solve all your problems... etc. Hm, why everyone should convert from OpenBSD or Solaris to Linux based systems !? Sometimes some IT magazines are presenting similar message out there: convert or die ! Why not sharing and coexist ? Torvalds believes Solaris users should die: "A lot of people still like Solaris, but I'm in active competition with them, and so I hope they die,"Well I hope they will do just fine. I never understood his aggressive politic against Solaris... Is Torvalds afraid ?

However I have to say my point of view on this matter, about the Linux based systems. I had some experience with such systems since 1997, in Romania, when I was finishing my degree at www.ugal.ro. I had access to Linux at that time and tried the system at home. It was kind of an experiment and it was running on my home PC. Soon I have invested my money in some CDs from Pacific HiTech Inc. distributing applications, the kernel, X11, kernel patches etc. Kind of fun! At the same time at school I had access to Solaris 2.5. After I left Romania, in 1998, to Finland my contact with Linux was kept by using SuSE and RedHat sometimes. At some point in time around 2000 I have totally gave up on Linux based systems. I have tried several times for curiosity Debian and Fedora too.

At the moment I do run OpenBSD, Solaris, and Windows XP. I do like Solaris and starting with Solaris 10 an entire new world has just opened: www.opensolaris.org ! Check it out ! Thanks to all Sun managers making this possible !

I do like Solaris more than Linux based systems and I consider Solaris much advanced and mature than any of distros. Some points before converting to Linux:

• What distro ? Fedora, SLES, RedHat Entreprise Linux WS, or AS or maybe ES because Oracle recommends that or maybe Gentoo to stay cool or maybe Debian to get lot of packages or Ubuntu etc etc Blah!. A lot of options. Nice. But why RedHat had to make 3 or 4 versions of their based Linux distro don't know. Same thing for SUSE, currently Novell. The same thing what Microsoft does with Windows... I would like to have the choice of having one distro called RedHat Linux. As simple as it is. Is there any Solaris AS, ES, WS , A1, B2, Solaris Entreprise ... nope it is just Solaris ! Dude get a life !

• I like what Eric Schrock mentioned in his blog about Solaris vs. Linux: Reliability, Serviceability, Observability and Resource management. Try to read the blog and think clear, don't fall on any of the sides

• A stable ABI does it matter !? I do believe that having a stable ABI would help vendors like nVIDIA and others develop things which will stay stable. Someone will say but hey, everything should be open sourced and it is just a matter of a recompile ... Everything ? Still waiting to see Oracle database server source code... Well I bet there will be always something which will not be open sourced so get along with it. So coming back having a stable ABI: Linux kernel does not follow this principle instead it does suggest that this is bad. Interesting point. I would be glad to see from RedHat, IBM or any other distro vendor a white paper on this mater: why having a stable ABI is bad and what are they recommending about that !?

I try to stop now, the list could go on but I do think there is space for all OSes out there so nobody must die :)

SAS: Serial Attached SCSI presentation

I've just read Rich's blog and found out some interesting presentation about SAS:
http://specials.seagate.com/sac/sun/

I'm thinking what vendors have already SAS controllers ? LSI, Adaptec ... !?

A new workstation runs... solaris express b25

Got a new machine: AMD X2 Dual Core 4800+, 250GB SATA2 disk, 2GB RAM
for aprox 2000e from MikroMafia. It is fast. Very fast. Worked fine with
Solaris Express build 25 from www.opensolaris.org/os/downloads

Some details below:

Mobo: ASUS A8N-SLI Premium S939 NF4 SLI 2*GLAN
CPU: AMD ATHLON 64 X2 4800+ S939 (2 x 1024 KB L2)
Memory: 2048 MB 4KPL 512Mb Kingston PC-3200 DDRAM
HDD: 250 GB SATA2 16MB Cache
Video: GEFORCE 6600 256MB VGA+DVI+TV-OUT

Disk:
SATA2 250GB Maxtor 16MB cache: works fine using nvidia controller.
This mobo has two SATA controllers. I haven't tried using Sillicon Image,
the 2nd controller.

genunix: [ID 640982 kern.info] IDE device at targ 0, lun 0 lastlun 0x0
genunix: [ID 846691 kern.info] model Maxtor 6L250S0
genunix: [ID 479077 kern.info] ATA/ATAPI-7 supported, majver 0xfe minver 0x1e
pci: [ID 370704 kern.info] PCI-device: ide@0, ata2
genunix: [ID 936769 kern.info] ata2 is /pci@0,0/pci-ide@8/ide@0
genunix: [ID 773945 kern.info] UltraDMA mode 6 selected
gda: [ID 243001 kern.info] Disk0:
ata: [ID 496167 kern.info] cmdk0 at ata2 target 0 lun 0
genunix: [ID 936769 kern.info] cmdk0 is /pci@0,0/pci-ide@8/ide@0/cmdk@0,0
unix: [ID 190185 kern.info] SMBIOS v2.3 loaded (2226 bytes)

Video:
I have a Geforce 6600, works fine with Xorg. I will try soon to install nvidia drivers
to gain some performance. Maybe I should try bzflag then :)

Network:
I have two Gig NICs. Im using the nvidia one fine without any
problems. However the second one, which is a Marvell 88E81001 should
have drivers for Solaris. I haven't got time for that yet.

lo0: flags=2001000849 mtu 8232 index 1
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000
nge0: flags=1000843 mtu 1500 index 2
inet 192.168.1.5 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255

gld: [ID 944156 kern.info] nge0: nge V1.1: type "ether" mac address 00:13:d4:53:db:f9
pci: [ID 370704 kern.info] PCI-device: pci1043,8141@a, nge0
genunix: [ID 936769 kern.info] nge0 is /pci@0,0/pci1043,8141@a
nge: [ID 801725 kern.info] NOTICE: nge0: link 100Mbps Full-Duplex up
pcplusmp: [ID 637496 kern.info] pcplusmp: pci10de,57 (nge) instance 0 vector 0x15 ioapic 0x2 intin 0x15 is bound to cpu 1

AMD X2 CPU:

0 on-line since 11/09/2005 18:51:15
1 on-line since 11/09/2005 18:51:17

Status of virtual processor 0 as of: 11/09/2005 19:49:54
on-line since 11/09/2005 18:51:15.
The i386 processor operates at 2412 MHz,
and has an i387 compatible floating point processor.
Status of virtual processor 1 as of: 11/09/2005 19:49:54
on-line since 11/09/2005 18:51:17.
The i386 processor operates at 2412 MHz,
and has an i387 compatible floating point processor.


The system is fast, very fast. JDS seems flying. Looking forward to get build27 soon.

BigLib...

BigLib should be a collection of many useful articles, tutorials about Solaris. At the moment I have published some of these under: www.nbl.fi/stefan.parvu
I will try to publish from time to time some some new things about: DTrace, ZFS, Solaris 10, OpenSolaris. I hope just to find the time to do that.

Welcome to my blog !

Hello world. My name is Stefan Parvu, Im a sysadmin working for Sun Microsystems Finland.


Notice:

All comments, infos I make are my opinions. They are in no
way related to my employer, Sun Microsystems.