fidzu : opera

The most popular mobile browser and music service to provide free downloadable music in nine African countries. Opera and Mdundo, a leading African music sharing platform, has announced that Opera Mini users can now, for free, listen to and download their favorite music from the most recognized artists in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, […]

19 Dec 2019 8:30am GMT

Opera GX is now ready to run on your Mac. According to a representative study conducted by Opera on gamers in the US, 14% of people play computer games on their macOS devices, while 82% use Windows machines. Although not dominant on the market, Mac remains a relevant gaming environment. The macOS version of the world's first gaming browser is now available for download in early access mode.

12 Dec 2019 8:45am GMT

OKash, one of the most popular microlending applications in Kenya, won the award as the best Mobile Loan Platform of 2019 at the 3rd Digital Tech Excellence Awards in Nairobi, Kenya. The award recognizes the outstanding positive impact the microlending app has had on the everyday life of its users in Kenya. OKash is an […]

06 Dec 2019 8:01am GMT

Opera's former CTO and one of the web's founding fathers, Håkon Wium Lie, proposes World Wide Browser Day in an interview and unveils a commemorative plaque at the location of the first Opera HQ in Oslo. Presto and WebKit celebrated on October 16,World Wide Browser Day On October 16, a blue historical plaque will be...

15 Oct 2019 2:17pm GMT

Hello everyone, A couple of weeks ago, when we met with some Opera users in Nigeria, we got the opportunity to talk with Oluwaseunfunmi and Seun who are both long-time Opera Mini users. They shared with us their life stories and experiences with the Opera Mini browser, telling us what using Opera Mini means to...

11 Oct 2019 9:06am GMT

Hello everyone, It was great to meet some of you in Lagos, Nigeria a few weeks ago and to hear your thoughts about Opera. While there, we got up-close and personal and spoke with Seun, Mofe, Oluwaseunfunmi, and Tochi about how they had discovered Opera. They also told us how Opera browsers and Opera News,...

30 Sep 2019 12:00pm GMT

Today's the big release for Oracle Solaris 11, after 7 years of development. For me, the Solaris 11 release comes a little more than 11 years after I joined the X11 engineering team at what was then Sun, and finishes off some projects that were started all the way back then.

For instance, when I joined the X team, Sun was finishing off the removal of the old OpenWindows desktop, and we kept getting questions asking about the rest of the stuff being shipped in /usr/openwin, the directory that held both the OpenLook applications and the X Window System software. I wrote up an ARC case at the time to move the X software to /usr/X11, but there were various issues and higher priority work, so we didn't end up starting that move until near the end of the Solaris 10 development cycle several years later. Solaris 10 thus had a mix of the recently added Xorg server and related code delivered in /usr/X11, while most of the existing bits from Sun's proprietary fork of X11R6 were still in /usr/openwin.

During Solaris 11 development, we finished that move, and then jumped again, moving the programs directly into /usr/bin, following the general Solaris 11 strategy of using /usr/bin for most of the programs shipped with the OS, and using other directories, such as /usr/gnu/bin, /usr/xpg4/bin, /usr/sunos/bin, and /usr/ucb for conflicting alternate implementations of the programs shipped in /usr/bin, no longer as a way to segregate out various subsystems to allow the OS to better fit onto the 105Mb hard disks that shipped with Sun workstations back when /usr/openwin was created. However, if for some reason you wanted to build your own set of X binaries, you could put them in /usr/X11R7 (as I do for testing builds of the upstream git master repos), and then put that first in your $PATH, so nothing is really lost here.

The other major project that was started during Solaris 10 development and finished for Solaris 11 was replacing that old proprietary fork of X11R6, including the Xsun server, with the modernized, modularized, open source X11R7.* code base from the new X.Org, including the Xorg server. The final result, included in this Solaris 11 release, is based mostly on the X11R7.6 release, including recent additions such as the XCB API I blogged about last year, though we did include newer versions of modules that had upstream releases since the X11R7.6 katamari, such as Xorg server version 1.10.3.

That said, we do still apply some local patches, configuration options, and other changes, for things from just fitting into the Solaris man page style or adding support for Trusted Extensions labeled desktops. You can see all of those changes in our source repository, which is searchable and browsable via OpenGrok on src.opensolaris.org (or via hgweb on community mirrors such as openindiana.org) and available for anonymous hg cloning as well. That xnv-clone tree is now frozen, a permanent snapshot of the Solaris 11 sources, while we've created a new x-s11-update-clone tree for the Solaris 11 update releases now being developed to follow on from here.

Naturally, when your OS has 7 years between major release cycles, the hardware environment you run on greatly changes in the meantime as well, and as the layer that handles the graphics hardware, there have been changes due to that. Most of the SPARC graphics devices that were supported in Solaris 10 aren't any more, because the platforms they ran in are no longer supported - we still ship a couple SPARC drivers that are supported, the efb driver for the Sun XVR-50, XVR-100, and XVR-300 cards based on the ATI Radeon chipsets, and the astfb driver for the AST2100 remote Keyboard/Video/Mouse/Storage (rKVMS) chipset in the server ILOM devices. On the x86 side, the EOL of 32-bit platforms let us clear out a lot of the older x86 video device drivers for chipsets and cards you wouldn't find in x64 systems - of course, there's still many supported there, due to the wider variety of graphics hardware found in the x64 world, and even some recent updates, such as the addition of Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) support for Intel graphics up through the Sandy Bridge generation.

For those who followed the development as it happened, either via watching our open source code releases or using one of the many development builds and interim releases such as the various Solaris Express trains, much of this is old news to you. For those who didn't, or who want a refresher on the details, you can see last year's summary in my X11 changes in the 2010.11 release blog post. Once again, the detailed change logs for the X11 packages are available, though unfortunately, all the links in them to the bug reports are now broken, so browsing the hg history log is probably more informative.

Since that update, which covered up to the build 151 released as 2010.11, we've continued development and polishing to get this Solaris 11 release finished up. We added a couple more components, including the previously mentioned xcb libraries, the FreeGLUT library, and the Xdmx Distributed Multihead X server. We cleaned up documentation, including the addition of some docs for the Xserver DTrace provider in /usr/share/doc/Xserver/. The packaging was improved, clearing up errors and optimizing the builds to reduce unnecessary updates. A few old and rarely used components were dropped, including the rstart program for starting up X clients remotely (ssh X forwarding replaces this in a more secure fashion) and the xrx plugin for embedding X applications in a web browser page (which hasn't been kept up to date with the rapidly evolving browser environment). Because Solaris 11 only supports 64-bit systems, and most of the upstream X code was already 64-bit clean, the X servers and most of the X applications are now shipped as 64-bit builds, though the libraries of course are delivered in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions for binary compatibility with applications of each flavor. The Solaris auditing system can now record each attempt by a client to connect to the Xorg server and whether or not it succeeded, for sites which need that level of detail.

In total, we recorded 1512 change request id's during Solaris 11 development, from the time we forked the "Nevada" gate from the Solaris 10 release until the final code freeze for todays release - some were one line bug fixes, some were man page updates, some were minor RFE's and some were major projects, but in the end, the result is both very different (and hopefully much better) than what we started with, and yet, still contains the core X11 code base with 24 years of backwards compatibility in the core protocols and APIs.

09 Nov 2011 10:10pm GMT

Solaris 11 is available for download "SunOS Release 5.11 Version 11.0", based on build snv_175b.

There are of course many changes since Solaris 10, most of them have been available in the latest build of OpenSolaris but there are some new that are unique to the final release of Solaris 11.

Install images are available for download and works on all current SPARC machines which is the T and M-series. There are also images available for X86-based machines which also can be used in VirtualBox. Here is a quick reference for the brand new packaging system: IPS one liners.

I will post more detailed follow-up after I've had time to test it for more than a few hours.

Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 - What's new
Download Oracle Solaris 11
Future features of Solaris 11

09 Nov 2011 6:57pm GMT

# usermod -K type=role root
# usermod -R +root -A +solaris.system.maintenance darrenm
# rolemod -K roleauth=user
# passwd -N root

09 Nov 2011 6:38pm GMT