Another month, another book, but still an apress one ;-).
This time, my eyes were focused on the operation system side. It is sad but after reading this book, i can still feel and see the echo of the wounded heart that oracle made by stopping the open solaris development in 2010.
This os reads and feals really well structured and "like a fresh breeze".
But back to the book. If have already index the book with my sticky markers and from now on i have quick access to the following content.
CLI
SMF
ZFS
Zones
AMP
SVN
DTrace
Links
The book contains 240 pages, so can not bring you in that deep. But it at least it tries, or tries to show you the great world of this operation system.
While playing around in a VM, it still feals that fresh and easy way. The os is well structured and by scratching at the top, all works well. And of course, just for DTrace, SMF and ZFS ... you should give open solaris a try.
The book itselfs is short and well written and shows you the represents you the main benefits of this os.
Because of the fact that open solaris is currently not in well progress, the price is more than cheap. And if not using open solaris, it is good to read about the concepts and the way the os is structured.
Try to mess around with the open solaris environment but don't want to boot up (or download) a fully fledged openindiana?
A answer could be MilaX.
MilaX is a small size Live CD distribution which runs completely off a CD or a USB pendrive. It is based on OpenSolaris and includes its basic features.
Whats on wikipedia about MilaX?
MilaX is an OpenSolaris Live CD distro designed to fit on a business-card sized miniCD. x86 and SPARC versions are downloadable in bootable ISO 9660 and USB disk images. The Live CD can also be used to install the operating system to a hard disk through with ZFS-boot support. MilaX can be successfully loaded in Vmware, Qemu and VirtualBox. Still small, it features light applications such as JWM, Beaver, Urxvt, Vim, Sylpheed, Midnight Commander, Midori, XMMS, ePDFView, VNC viewer, Rdesktop, Conky. By installing the SVR4 and IPS add-ons, you can basically convert MilaX into OpenSolaris. MilaX booted into JWM Desktop in about ~14 seconds on SSD drive.
SmartOS incorporates the four most revolutionary OS technologies of the past decade — Zones, ZFS, DTrace and KVM — into a single operating system, providing an arbitrarily observable, highly multi-tenant environment built on a reliable, enterprise-grade storage stack. With the introduction of KVM in SmartOS, you no longer have to give up the power of an enterprise-grade operating system in order to run legacy applications and stacks.
SmartOS turns any server into a highly efficient hosting platform for multi-tenant, machine-to-machine, or storage applications. SmartOS offers unique, innovative tools for application developers, service providers and data center operators – tuned and hardened for modern datacenter deployment.
Ein Entwicklerteam des Cloud-Providers Joyent hat den Hypervisor des Linux-Kernels auf den freien OpenSolaris-Kernel des Illumos-Projekts portiert. Wie die Entwickler schreiben, soll KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machines) die OpenSolaris-Variante SmartOS um hardwaregestützte Virtualisierung erweitern – als Ergänzung zu der Virtualisierungstechnik Zones des Solaris-Kernels, mit der mehrere Benutzerzumgebungen gegeneinander abgeschottet unter einem Kernel laufen.