Solaris 10 11/04 Build 72 is due Nov 30th. Big addition this time around will be the AMD64 release! Keep an eye out for documenation and the usual spot to be the first to nab it.

The Blastwave project, providing community-built binary software packages for Solaris, is in dire need of funding and is on the verge of ceasing operations.

The project has been frozen recently with over 800 packages available for download. Sun has donated an LX50 server for builds, but Dennis Clarke (the founder) is in the process of selling his house to keep the site and service up for another couple of months in hopes he can find employment by then. He has written a proposal on sponsorship that has been submitted to Sun, but nothing has come of it yet.

Donate, and help keep Blastwave alive!

Lately we’ve been hearing a lot about Sarbanes-Oxley (namely “Section 404 Compliance”) from Sun, especially when Jonathan was on Wall Street. However, there are lot of us who had never heard of it, especially if you’re at a private company.

Thankfully, Emmett Dulaney’s “Sarbanes-Oxley Documentation for Administrators” article on UNIXreview.com has got us covered. If your company is thinking about going public or you just want to keep up for your next job, its a good quick read with several useful links on the topic.

Martin Fink, Linux Vice President at HP made some pretty serious statements in his Nov 15th blog. Particularly, he accuses Sun of overstating claims about Solaris10, calls into question the open sourcing of Solaris despite the project not being officially announced, and generally suggests that Solaris is just a Linux wanna be.

We’ve already seen response from some of the Sun bloggers (and even linkage to these responses by Jonathan). There has been a community response.

The battles just keep heating up, and this is just the beginning.

SAGEwire the news site of the System Administrators Guild is currently calling for public papers from the community of UNIX administrators. This is a great oppertunity to plug any papers that you have written on UNIX and sysadmin related topics. They claim that no post will be denied.

Sun launched Solaris 10 today. A final release version should be out by the end of January 2005, but Solaris Express program is available for anyone who wants to try out the Solaris 10 OE now. The new version of the Solaris operating environment also has a new logo:

According to this NEWS.COM article, Solaris will be free for systems using x86 processors. Security updates will also be provided at no charge, but bug fixes and support will require an annual subscription fee.

The subscription will cost $120 per processor per year for bug fixes, $240 per processor per year for 12-hour support five days a week and $360 per processor per year for 24-hour support seven days a week. With premium support, the new Solaris 10 version will cost $1,440 per year for a server with four Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices, for example.

A November 11 feature article presents two Core Java Technology Tech Tips, titled “What’s New in the Math Class,” and “Changes in Working with ContentPane,” which explain the new methods that were added to the Math and StrictMath classes in J2SE 5.0, and how much easier it is now to add components to Swing containers.

Read about it here: http://java.sun.com/developer/JDCTechTips/2004/tt1102.html

In Part One of our interview with Dan Hushon, Chief Technologist for the US Client Services Organization for Sun Microsystems, we looked at ways to foster more cohesive and productive interactions between developers and IT departments. In Part Two, we explore adaptive enterprise architectures, the market for developers, Java Centers of Excellence, and loosely coupled components.
Read about it here: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/hushon2_qa.html

The guys over at JDSHelp.org have the Java Desktop System LiveCD available for download.

Direct Access provides online interviews with Sun’s executives and engineers on hot topics pertaining to your IT questions. Check out Balint Fleischer, vice president and chief technologist for Sun Storage, who is interviewed by John Gage, chief researcher at Sun.

They will discuss Sun’s extremely broad range of storage offerings, from the flexible workgroup StorEdge 3000 servers to the StorEdge 9000 series for storage consolidation and the StorEdge 5210 NAS appliance. Special attention is given to the innovative, new Sun StorEdge 6920 system launched in September.

Check it out: http://www.sun.com/directaccess/

According to this News.Com article, Sun’s new marketing executive will be Tom Goguen, a former Apple executive in charge of marketing Apple OS X for servers and high-performance technical computing.

The Hungarian UNIX Portal has posted a review with 113 screenshots of Solaris10 Beta7 including JDS. For those of you unable or unwilling to give it a spin, this is a great way to get a feel for the basics.

It’s about time! Solaris10 Beta7, Build 69 is avalible for download. If everything goes according to schedule this will be the final Express release before the release of Solaris 10. The changes in his release are too widespread to report here, but some of the highlights are the switch to the Xorg X Server (for Solaris x86), inclusion of the service manager!, IPP updates, Firewire support and updates, several additions to system utilities to become Zones aware, new ptools, enhanced SVM functionality, and the inclusion of the Java Desktop System release 3. This is a massive release. Fire up Live Upgrade or pull out a spare X86 and start playing. Numberous X86 enhancements have been made, so machines that might have had trouble running Solaris/X86 in the past are worth another try! Read the Whats New Documentation here.

According to this ITWorld article, Solaris 10 will be officially launched on November 15th at the NC04 event in San Jose.

Early-access development releases are available today under the Solaris Express program.