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Oslo - Soon, more than 200 million Android users in Europe will be able to choose their favorite browser. In a blog post, Google has outlined that it will "…do more to ensure that Android phone owners know about the wide choice of browsers and search engines available to download to their phones. This will […]

20 Mar 2019 5:36pm GMT

Enhance privacy and security with free and unlimited browser VPN service Oslo, Norway, 20 March, 2019: Opera, the Norwegian browser developer, released a new version of its mobile browser, Opera for Android 51, which now features a built-in VPN service. The new browser VPN is free, unlimited and easy to use. When enabled it gives […]

20 Mar 2019 8:30am GMT

Munich - Opera Touch won the top distinction in this year's iF DESIGN AWARD, the iF gold award. From 6,375 submissions, only few were awarded the gold by the independent expert iF jury. The winning Opera Touch, won a gold award in the discipline Communication, in the mobile app category. The jury released the following […]

15 Mar 2019 3:02pm GMT

Get to know Emminex, the Game of Thrones fan and Opera Mini user who writes poems inspired by fantasy books he finds in the Worldreader app Emminex is a very avid reader who reads for at least four hours every day on his mobile phone. He loves writing poetry and seeing animated films. He's a...

04 Sep 2018 2:55pm GMT

The Opera for Android team has been busy adding a lot of new things for you in the latest version. We listen to comments and suggestions from our users, and we know that personalization and customization are valued. Themes We are happy to announce themes! Now you can browse with your own style. Tweak the...

08 Jun 2018 9:53am GMT

Today is International Women's Day, the day where women from different fields, educational levels and backgrounds are recognized and celebrated all around the world for their achievements. Presently, women make up just 17% of the tech workforce, thus more and more women are encouraged to pursue careers in tech. Initiatives such as Girls who Code...

08 Mar 2018 1:46pm 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