Information Security The theory behind security

After using Ubuntu Linux on my laptop for a while, it seems it has everything Linux has to offer on desktop. But it still lacks some of the features which Solaris have since years e.g. Zones, DTrace, Trusted Extensions, ZFS, Cryptographic Framework and the list could be endless. If you look at Solaris history it has been out there in production environments since years, its one of the most trusted Unix distro out there. Linux has grown up a long way since its inception, Solaris has done similar for Unix market. I think Solaris would have been more prevalent in the industry then it is today if it had been open sourced before 10 years. Initially solaris was glued to SPARC architecture to target small number of high-end enterprise customers, but after it has been opensourced it now supports more hardware platform then any other operating system in the world. OpenSolaris community is growing up day after day and more and more people are contributing to this open source innovation.

OpenSolaris Indiana Preview: Indiana lives as a project under opensolaris banner. Sun has made it clear that its going after the binary distribution of solaris after hiring Ian Murdoch, founder of Debian Linux. The project is going at a steady pace under Ian's leadership and first preview was released October 2007, and next preview release is expected later this month. Two production versions are set to be released later in the year.
 

After playing with Indiana preview, my first impression were of mixed feeling. I was happy in a way that I could use linux like interface and be a solaris user, but at the other end there will be so much stuff in Solaris will need to be transferred to this binary distro. I hope the project team and open source contributors are working on converting all long command line utils under solaris to GUI under Indiana atleast. Not out of a personal choice I prefer to have GUI for most of the tools but it makes many people to come and try it out. As Ubuntu has developed its community around desktop and server versions, Indiana will just to that to attract more and more end users on to solaris. There are few active developments currently under way, if you are interested please visit following links:

Indiana Projects

The following individual Indiana projects have their own documentation
page.

• Image Packaging System Documentation
  Choose packages from a network repository of Open Solaris packages that are ready for distribution

So, watch out for the next Indiana release as we are tracking well with all other OpenSource projects. It will definitely be in time available to play with later this year. Lets make 2008, the year of Solaris on Desktops / Laptops.