Folks, I'm looking at setting up a system to take advantage of ZFS on Solaris x86_64. I'm not terribly concerned about whether it's OpenSolaris or Solaris Express. What I want to use it for is a fileserver. My understanding is that OpenSolaris is the open-licensed version of the code, but it lacks certain things like the ability to load additional drivers (I may need that for up-to-date RAID card support). I'm not sure what the state of compilers is on OpenSolaris. Solaris Express is apparently simply the latest & most up-to-date version of solaris.
Here's what I've run into attempting to acquire this stuff so far. First I create an account on the opensolaris website, and while I'm waiting for my account validation email, I notice that the help note for "if your registration email does not show up, contact nobody at somedomain.nowhere for help". I'm not kidding. I find a page on the opensolaris site for instructions on the Sun Studio tools: http://opensolaris.org/os/community/tools/sun_studio_tools/ Following the links from there, you arrive at a link to "Download Install image" of Solaris Studio 11 for Opensolaris. That link points here: https://cds.sun.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/CDS-CDS_Developer-Site/en_US/-/USD/ViewProductDetail-Start?ProductRef=SS11-OSOL-AUG07-SF-G-F at CDS-CDS_Developer At that link, it asks me to choose platform and language. The page is clearly labelled "Sun Studio 11 for Open Solaris", but the platform choices are Solaris Express for Sparc or x86, and the ONLY language choice is "Chinese Simplified". Okay, perhaps I'm going the wrong route by going through the opensolaris site. Next, I try http://developers.sun.com/devtools/index.html - I had signed up and joined the sun developer network to make sure I could download things, and at this page, I see a dropdown to select which developer tools I want, and a "Get It" button next to the dropdown. I choose "Sun Studio Software", click "Get It", and nothing happens. Apparently the javascript code for that button is broken, it works neither with Firefox 2, Firefox 3, nor with Internet Explorer 7. After that failure, I try www.sun.com/download to see if I can find the sun studio download from there. In the "Top Downloads" I see a link for Sun Studio 12. I go there, and find I can get to a download link, but perusing the release notes, the "supported platforms" only talks about Solaris 9 or 10. No mention of OpenSolaris or Solaris Express. If I download Sun Studio 12, will it install on OpenSolaris? Since I can't guarantee any version of Sun Studio on OpenSolaris, perhaps I should simply download and install Solaris Express Developer Edition. Back to www.sun.com/downloads. Once again, in the top downloads section, there's an entry for "Solaris Express, Developer Edition". I click on that link, and it takes me to a page for downloading .... OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris and Solaris Express were supposedly different editions... I thought. Why is a link for Solaris Express taking me to OpenSolaris? So, WHAT exactly do I need to download to have an up-to-date functional Solaris with compiler tools, and where can I download it? I'm pretty sure these terribly broken websites aren't indicitive of the end-product quality, but I'm pretty frustrated at this point. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
