Posts by Sriram Narayanan

Thanks for the pragmatic review

Thanks for the pragmatic perspective on the distro called opensolaris 2008.5. I quite like the balanced view you have taken throughout the article.

As is the case with most opensolaris 2008.5 reviews, though, there is scant mention of any of the next generation features that opensolaris provides to software developers, desktop users and system administrators. This is not surprising given that we in the opensolaris community are still working on highlighting the various features and depend upon comments in blogs for publicizing such features.

Solaris and the OpenSolaris Code base have a vast number of innovations and features that are unfortunately not being highlighted. A simple case in point would be the innovative use of the much talked about DTrace. We in the Belenix team used DTrace to optimize the LiveCD boot up process and this innovation is now part of the distro contructor project at opensolaris.org. Belenix and OpenSolaris 2008.5 today benefit from this facility.

Belenix is an opensolaris based derivate and is the origin for a large number of innovations that have gone into the making of opensolaris 2008.5 which you have just reviewed. This is sadly not at all discussed anywhere, but perhaps 80 % of the opensolaris 2008.5 foundations are based on Belenix. More details on these http://blogs.sun.com/moinakg/entry/project_indiana_internals_short_overview

We in the Belenix community believe in making sure that everyday Unix enthusiasts are able to realize the benefits of OpenSolaris technologies, and our way of achieving this is to get a fully functional KDE based desktop environment to the end user. The intent is to provide the same KDE environment that most Linux/Unix enthusiasts are used to, so that one can then start exploring opensolaris technologies and put them to use.

There would definitely be some work involved in creating documentation (tutorials, howtos, etc). We hope to make time and work with the larger opensolaris community to make this happen.

BTW, I think we should all stop thinking that OpenSolaris is "copying" Linux. After all other Unixes too have KDE/Gnome environments. Check out the various BSD distros which also provide KDE/Gnome/XFCE environments to end users. All of these (including Solaris itself) have had Gnome based environments just as Linux distros have.

After all, even the average Linux based distribution is largely a tested compilation of GNU userland and a desktop environment. Each distro differentiates itself from others by desktop integration and the tools and applications bundled.

Thus, most Linux distro users don't really use the kernel itself - they only use the GNU userland and the Desktop environment.

-- Sriram

http://www.belenix.org

http://www.swtbot.org

http://dynamicproxy.livejournal.com/

http://www.thoughtworks.com/