Project Indiana Developer Preview Release
The first (developer) release of Sun’s Gnu/Linux inspired OpenSolars distribution has been released. Earlier in the month we reported on “Project Indiana Details” emerging in which the first developer release was promised for the end of October. Sun honoured that date — if by the skin of their teeth.
This present release is both a Live CD and Installer (similar to ubuntu, again, see previous article “Project Indiana Details” for similarities). It contains the core OS, and desktop environment and Indiana’s new packages management system “IPS” or “Image Packaging System”.
Taking a quick glance through the release announcement what is interesting to note is the inclusion of GNU utilities on the default system $PATH, unlike Solaris where users had to go out of their way to use GNU utilities instead of Suns. ZFS will be used as the default filesystem, which is a feature I’m sure many people will like to play around with. Currently the beta FreeBSD 7 installer (finstall) has the option to install on a ZFS filesystem — no current GNU/Linux distributions support ZFS yet.
I’ve said this before, but I think this is the reverse balkanization that happend to UNIX in the 80’s. In 10 years I believe you will no longer have Solaris, HP-UX or AIX administrators, just GNU/Linux admins.
Resources
Project Indiana “Project Page”
Filed under: Solaris