2008.11: A roundup

With the launch over, I took a few minutes to read through today's blog entries, and pulled out a list of the either technical or personally significant entries. If you're looking for the highlights, Calum's overview seems to be a great place to start. He's got links to the best summaries and screencasts.

• First, if you're running 2008.05 and considering upgrading—recommended strongly—please watch Markus's screencast. There are one or two tricky steps to pay attention to. (We got caught offguard by some misinteractions between GRUB, ZFS, and early startup; won't happen again.)
• Erwann's screencast is a great introduction to Time Slider, and I'm pretty confident no turkeys were harmed during filming.
• Peter has screen captures of top(1) on a couple of older laptops, including one with 447 MiB available to the OS. Dave and the Install team worked hard to keep 512 MiB systems booting on the release; here's evidence.
• Doug's pkgfactory/roboporter discussion and Nico's explanation of the repositories show an extremely promising way to make sure there's a wide variety of software available for OpenSolaris—make the computers do the grunt work. Doug and Nico, and Jim Walker, have been pushing hard on improving porting efficiencies.
• Knut explains using JavaDB as a managed service on 2008.11. Since Knut's post combines pkg(5) and smf(5) invocations, it easily wins a spot in any summary I might write. (And so it appears in this one.)
• Jerry describes the foundational work for integrating zones, Snap Upgrade, and pkg(5). The changes to filesystem layout to support that integration place limitations on zones across the 2008.05 to 2008.11 transition, so be sure to review Jerry's post if you've been experimenting with ipkg zones on the release.
• John reviews 2008.11 as a suitable paravirtualized guest on xVM, with some careful discussion of how to handle the graphical console.
• Shawn's the sole member of the image packaging team to get a technical entry up. Shawn talks about the depot refacing work he's done and planning on doing for 2009.next. (Shawn modestly omits the fact that he also implemented "pkg history" and operational intent in the client.)
• Finally, I'm giving Fintan the nod for best screenshot, even if I prefer to see this release on the metal.

There are a lot of entries under tagged with opensolaris; you'll find coverage of many other aspects of the release.

[ T: OpenSolaris 2008.11 ]