OpenSolaris Rises Over Indiana

By Alex Handy

May 6, 2008 —  As voters wandered into their cramped cloth-covered booths in Indiana this morning, Sun Microsystems and its development community was also in the state, metaphorically. OpenSolaris' Project Indiana was completed yesterday, and today is the first day that many users and administrators are able to sit down and try out the improvements to this open-source UNIX.

Headed by Debian Linux founder Ian Murdock, Project Indiana has reached the goals set out back in early 2007, when Murdock joined Sun. Those goals were to create a replacement package management system, to refine the installation process and to bring a more Bash-like shell environment into the system.

Murdock had said in the past that he did not want to simply remake apt-get for Solaris. The new Image Packaging System is, however, simple to use, like apt-get, and is capable of gathering all dependencies and installing such files as a group. Murdock and his team, however, were able to fix many of the problems apt-get always had, allowing the IPS to function as a change management and regression system as well.

Also new to this version of the open-source operating system is a refined installation experience. Murdock has said that the overarching goal of Project Indiana was to make Solaris a more palatable experience for users who've come over from Linux. That meant adding in simple aliases for command-line actions that may have slightly different names, and giving users the ability to choose from more Linux-like shells.

As always, OpenSolaris also includes ZFS and DTrace, both of which are moving across operating system lines. Both are part of Apple's newest road maps, and projects to port these technologies to Linux are both well under way.

OpenSolaris with Project Indiana is available for free online at www.opensolaris.com.



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