Today marks the release of Solaris Express 08/05 (or Nevada Build 19). You can obtain a free download.
Here’s a breakdown of what’s new. I’ve started annotating some of the
new features with links to the corresponding RFE in the bug database.
Roughly 600 bugs were fixed since the SX 07/05 release.
Notable New Features in Solaris “Nevada”, Build 19 (08/2005)
Desktop
-
The dcam1394(7D) driver is now available on all platforms (formerly it was
SPARC only); it implements a subset of the 1394 Trade Association Digital
Camera Specification. A sample program which uses a camera will be
available in a future build. - An important improvement to USB support on Solaris has arrived–
automatic handling of unknown USB devices by libUSB and the kernel’s
USB infrastructure. This means that without any additional configuration,
you should be able to plug in a device such as a digital camera, and
have gphoto recognize it. In contrast, you previously needed to
do manual configuration.
[6213551] - The USB CCID IFD Handler was integrated. This is a userland driver (from
the MUSCLE project) for
USB CCID-compliant smartcard readers. You can now use a wide variety
of USB smartcard readers with Solaris. - glxinfo & glxgears were added as a followup part of the MESA integration.
- ATI Xorg drivers were updated to June 2005 version
- The i810 driver was updated for i945G & E7221 support. But please
note that there were some problems with this integration and the
Xorg i810 driver now refuses to load. Intel graphics users may need to switch
back to Xsun or copy the i810_drv.so from an older build.
[6301351]
Security
- pam.conf(4) picks up a very useful include control flag which
should help break up a complex pam configuration into separate files.
[6258443] - Scalability when a large number (thousands) of IPsec policy rules
are in place has been substantially improved.
[6227733] - Kerberos’s graphical key management tool gkadmin(1m) picks up the
ability to specify the key encryption type.
Hardware Support
- Improved tolerance for USB 2.0 controllers on some VIA chipsets.
[6213463] - Support for the Dell PERC 3/Si RAID card was added.
- Support for the Dell Precision 670’s SCSI card (Adaptec AIC-7901A with
HostRAID) was added. - MPxIO (I/O multipathing) support for a number of devices from Engenio, SGI,
StorageTek and Sun was added. - The lsimega(7D) driver from LSI Logic
was added, providing support for
LSI’s new generation of 320-2x RAID cards. Older LSI cards are already
supported via the amr(7D) driver.
Other
-
find picks up the -mmin (modified n minutes ago), -amin
(accessed n minutes ago) and -cmin (status changed n
minutes ago) options.
[5077247]
OpenSolaris Source Cleanup
- Not a feature per se but we’ve made a huge amount of progress
in cleaning up the source code to be cleanly compilable using gcc. In this
release we’ve got 32 more bugs worth of gcc cleanup taken care of. It’ll
probably be a couple of more months before we’re completely done.If you’d like to help out with the cleanup efforts, take a look at
Building
OpenSolaris with GCC over at the
OpenSolaris
tools community. -
Jonathan’s excellent fixes to
the cstyle
tool mean that it now checks continuation lines properly
via the -c option. Hooray for code cleanliness!