Solaris 11.4 open beta

[foetz]

just a heads up that the 11.4 beta is available for download now. for more see: https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/oracle ... a-released

an interesting detail is that it identifies itself as 11.4.0.12.0. i guess that's what should have been 12 at first.

[vishnu]

I've posted this link before but since I evidently love repeating myself hereabout I'll post it again. Alan Coopersmith's blog (Technical Lead for the Solaris 11.4 release):

https://blogs.oracle.com/author/alan-coopersmith

And his twitter (which still has the Solaris 12.0 screenshot):

https://twitter.com/alanc?lang=en

[foetz]

gotta say tho, with every new version solaris 11 gets more lavish as far as required resources and required software goes. for example it's not possible to uninstall x11 anymore and conveniently the native pkg has no "force" option
and as for the needed resources, for installing 11.2 a vm with 8gb disk and 1gb ram was okay. for 11.4 2gb ram and 12gb disk is not enough anymore. at least for the installation. you can cut it down a bit afterwards.

anyhow there're some nice additions, too. a rather trivial but handy one is that some libs changed. to be more precise you don't have to use -lsocket anymore. that was particularly nasty for compiling network oriented stuff that wasn't targeted at solaris specifically.
throughput limits are also very welcome for controlling otherwise greedy apps and the foss fans might be glad about having a ready-to-go clang on request now.
pf got updated to the openbsd 5.5 standard but in return ipf is gone. and so is sunssh, only openssh is available now.


that aside, to everyone who likes it a bit lighter and more customizable, i can recommend to have a look at tribblix. it still has all the basic solaris 11 stuff but offers much more control on the software side and is quite light for a solaris 11. the support is also very good.

[vishnu]

I'm still running 10 on my Blade 2500, with the intention of not upgrading again until 12 came out, but since the likelihood of that ever occurring seems to be on a permanent downward spiral, I guess I'll give 11.4 a try. And if it messes up by box I'll just start trolling Alan Coopersmith...

[adso]

I guess I'll give 11.4 a try. And if it messes up by box I'll just start trolling Alan Coopersmith...

I'm afraid you are out of luck here: Solaris 11.x does not work on SB2500.

[vishnu]

I guess I'll give 11.4 a try. And if it messes up by box I'll just start trolling Alan Coopersmith...

I'm afraid you are out of luck here: Solaris 11.x does not work on SB2500.

Just goes to show how much I've been keeping up on Solaris development, which is to say, not at all...

[cb88]

http://www.tribblix.org/about.html

Might work on the 2500... it's lightweight enough unlike stock solaris. But it is also mostly untested and doesn't offer a direct install cd for the latest release as nobody is helping test it.

[jpstewart]

The situation with the 11.4 beta is worse than I realized. I knew support for the Sparc-based workstations such as the Blade 2500 was dropped when Solaris 11 first came out. But it seems that everything older than the T4 series machines has been dropped as of 11.4 according to the official documentation. I'd been considering updating my T5240 (T2+ CPU) to 11.4, but I guess 11.3 is the end of the line there. They sure are aggressive about dropping hardware support from new releases.

[Titox]

A lot of Intel/AMD x64 systems are not supported also... seems they took the Apple route

[foetz]

A lot of Intel/AMD x64 systems are not supported also

well sticking together a bunch of off-the-shelf parts which work shouldn't be a problem