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OpenSolaris and NetBeans Featured at CommunityOne
5/5/2008
Sun Microsystems plans to make several product and partner announcements today at its CommunityOne Developer event. CommunityOne is a "pre-event" that precedes the annual JavaOne conference, which is happening this week in San Francisco. CommunityOne focuses on a variety of open source communities, both Sun and non-Sun.
One highlight will be Sun's joint announcement with the OpenSolaris community of the immediate availability of the OpenSolaris operating system. Sun relicensed its Solaris OS as open source code about two years ago, and it's had several releases since that time. However, this release will be the first one that provides full production support and global distribution for the open source product, which is based on the Solaris kernel.
OpenSolaris Under the Hood
OpenSolaris represents a "massive advancement," according to Stephen Lau, OpenSolaris governing board member, in a statement.
"It combines the strong foundation of Solaris technologies and tools with modern desktop features and applications developed by open source communities such as GNOME, Mozilla, and the FSF." The OS provides an ideal environment for students, developers, and early adopters looking to learn and experiment with innovative technologies, he added.
This new release (2008.05) of OpenSolaris comes with the new Image Packaging System (IPS). The IPS is designed to simplify and speed installation and integration with third-party applications, according to Dan Roberts, director of Solaris and OpenSolaris marketing.
"This is a network-based, network-aware packaging system with full dependency-checking capabilities," he said. "It makes it possible to slim down the operating system and makes it very simple for folks to get up and started quickly and easily. You get a LiveCD for installation, and then you can customize and configure the environment."
OpenSolaris 2008.05 is also the first OS to use ZFS as its default file system. Introduced in Solaris 10, ZFS file systems are built on top of virtual storage pools, enabling instant roll-back and continual check-summing capabilities.
Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) is also part of the OS. DTrace is designed to allow developers to observe running systems at production or during development, what Sun calls "pervasive observability." This version of DTrace comes with a graphical user interface called DLight. This release also supports Solaris Containers, an implementation of operating system-level virtualization technology, which was also first made available in Solaris 10.
OpenSolaris 2008.05 is available now for download at the OpenSolaris Web site.
Elastic Compute Cloud Availability
The OpenSolaris community is also set to announce that, starting on Monday, its namesake operating system will be available on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, better known as EC2. Still in beta, EC2 is a Web service designed to provide resizable computing capacity in the cloud. Through EC2 Web services interfaces, users request an arbitrary number of virtual machines called Amazon Machine Images, onto which they can load applications, libraries, data and associated configuration settings.
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