OpenSolaris 2008.11 Released, Reviewed 87
ab5tract writes "2008.11 has been released and can be downloaded here.
There's a review at Ars Technica. Also, there's a good overview of the new TimeSlider feature at dZone."
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OpenSolaris 2008.11 Released, Reviewed
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'm curious (Score:5, Interesting)
OpenSolaris comes with the original lex, flex, and similar vintage goodies (and their source), but honestly in a non-networked environment, I could give a rip about installing it over Ubuntu or PCLinux OS at this point, I'm afraid.
I would, however, support installing it in a networked environment because of Sun's support for NFS (or sshfs rather) and NIS (/kerberos) right out of the box, something open source systems OpenSolaris tends to copy have yet to completely master (don't read into that too much, I know there is a thing called "design patterns").
On my laptop, though, I uninstalled it after about a week and slapped "plain" Solaris 10 in its place, for both nostalgia with CDE and a fresh look with JDE and an even better set of built in tools. I love open source software, but as far as Solaris preferences go, I like sun's current Solaris 10 over OpenSolaris currently, and the fact most of the FOSS operating systems are starting to become cookie cutter-like is not helping.
I know this may be just what the FOSS community doesn't want to hear, but it just provides room for improvement given the standard the original Solaris set for me (and Fedora will never be quite as hardened as RHEL
When does the important stuff arrive? (Score:5, Interesting)
(Open)Solaris is neat, I'm a die hard Solaris fan when it comes to servers. And sure, ZFS is pretty neat with regards to its capabilities. It can save expand, shrink, create snapshots, reroll them and so on. All in all it is indeed a pretty amazing filesystem, extremely flexible and its almost suited for full serious use.
EXCEPT one very important feature and I can't believe that so many people seem perfectly willing to disregard the whole issue as a non-issue...
When oh when will we be able to create *useable* external backups on ZFS? I'm well aware that you can dump a ZFS snapshot to stdout and then do whatever you like with it (dump it on tape, dump it on another box using an SSH tunnel, or even dump it to /dev/null ;-)) but thats exactly my point. This is absolutely not the usefull way to backup your data externally.
Because once you need to restore this data (Mr. Doe lost a very important file 2 weeks ago, only noticed it today and needs to be restored ASAP) your only option on ZFS will be to import the whole damned snapshot again. I dunno about you but I am *not* too thrilled about having to import a whole homedir slice just to restore one frickin file. I think its really a major drag that with an filesystem which is praised to be "enterprise worthy" it still lacks a simple but useful backup tool like dump/restore.
And yes: I'm well aware that the ZFS crowd is probably going to get back to "if you need a solid backup you should buy good software" or (IMO even worse:) "whats stopping you from using tar". Thats really missing the whole point here... An enterprise based filesystem, open sourced and all, and it can't even do something as simple which ext2, ext3, xfs and yes; even UFS could do for YEARS?
So... Cool, opensolaris has a timeslider. As long as they aim this at the end user I'll fully agree that its pretty neat and amazing. But I sure hope that Sun doesn't leave their faithful admins standing in the cold. As long as this issue isn't covered my servers remain on UFS. Sun; DO SOMETHING!
Better interface than Time Machine (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple's user interfaces are generally... OK, and at least consistent. Time Machine's user interface is bloody awful, useless, and (of course) completely inconsistent with everything else in the system including Dashboard, Spaces, and Expose ... the previous trio of user-interface standards busters that at least seemed to be moving towards a common meta-interface.
TimeSlider is much better. No big fancy 3d interface, just a slider in a folder you can drag forward and back... without abandoning the desktop. And the way Apple *implements* Time Machine that functionality would be rather easy to implement.
Oh well. Apple never forgives someone making them look bad, and they never back down on bad UI, so we won't see this in Snow Leopard. :p
Re:When does the important stuff arrive? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why not pair up a zfs send with a zfs receive to make an external backup? Then mount the external backup snapshot as needed?
Re:Better interface than Time Machine (Score:3, Interesting)
I know English is a difficult language, but I believe the correct conjugation you were looking for is 'were'.
No, I mean "are". And I mean "OK", not "good".
They used to manage good UIs that also looked good, but this hasn't been the case for a while.
Apple's UI has never struck me as being particularly good. They're OK. The best thing about them is the consistency... for software you're supposed to use on our desktop, even in their worst UI excesses they have been far more consistent than most. Front Row diverges from the usual UI model, but it's designed for use from the couch on a lower resolution screen. The iPhone UI is different, but self-consistent.
But this is like they put the Front Row team on the UI, without thinking about whether it made the slightest bit of sense.
Nice version name (Score:3, Interesting)
Version 2008.11
How could it be any simpler? It's the november 2008 version.
No "Vista", "Leopard" or "Feisty Fawn" (geeze, wtf is that one).
Congratulations on using a version number that anyone can understand.