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The print manager has not yet been given the Gnome desktop's look and feel.
Zoom The print manager has not yet been given the Gnome desktop's look and feel.

The Gnome network tool can now handle the Network Auto-Magic feature of Solaris – networks can be configured via the GUI, without the necessity to manually disable Network Auto-Magic, which was required in previous versions. A new applet for WLAN connectivity displays the available WLANs and flawlessly established a WPA2-encrypted connection in our test.

OpenSolaris can now automatically recognise hot-plugged printers. The print manager, which also deals with network printers, clearly still belongs to the "old" Solaris world – it appears slightly out of place among all the Gnome and Gtk tools.

The Solaris ZFS file system has the ability to take snapshots. A snapshot permanently captures the current status of the file system and only starts to require disk space once files are edited or deleted – this allows accidentally deleted or overwritten files, to be retrieved from the snapshot.

OpenSolaris 2008.11 is the first to offer the snapshot feature conveniently on the desktop: Once the Time Slider feature in the System Administration menu has been activated, the system will take regular snapshots – every 15 minutes for the past hour, once an hour for the past 24 hours, once a day for the past week and so on. The developers added a timeline to the Nautilus file manager for navigating through the snapshots and restoring deleted or overwritten files. A video explains the details. Although other special ZFS features, like the convenient management of RAID arrays, still need to be accessed on the command line.

The timeline in Nautilus allows easy restoration of deleted files.
Zoom The timeline in Nautilus allows easy restoration of deleted files.

Two new meta packages – storage-nas and storage-server – offer a collection of various software packages from NFS and SMB/CIFS servers, through iSCSI and Fibre Channel support, to virus scanners that allow setting up an [ticker:uk_112212 OpenSolaris computer as a file server] or a SAN storage device. The packages include drivers, server services and admin tools. The new version offers quite a bit of new software in this area.

After installing the SUNWauto-install package, an automated installation procedure for adding several systems with identical configurations, can be set up. The new distribution constructor (SUNWdistro-const package) creates separate, bootable and pre-configured images of OpenSolaris.

Conclusion

OpenSolaris 2008.11 does meet its stated aim of offering Linux users a familiar work environment. Installation from the live media does not require any knowledge of Solaris, and despite a few gaps in the hardware support, OpenSolaris should run smoothly on most computers. The current version has made considerable progress in terms of incorporating specific underlying Solaris features into the desktop, most notably the Time Slider, but also tools like the network manager, the WLAN applet and the improved package manager. It is now more suitable as an operating system for NAS filers, and for SAN storage.

OpenSolaris can be downloaded free of charge from the internet. Those who want to use the system for critical tasks can buy two different levels of support from Sun.

(odi)

See also:

  • [ticker:uk_112212 OpenSolaris as a file server]
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