Underexposed

• Camera Test: Nikon D300 - - PopPhotoDecember 2007 - Camera of the year for PopPhoto. Likes: low noise up to ISO 3200, great autofocus, included raw-processing software.
• Nikon 14-24mm f2.8 G, tested on a Canon 5D - A rave review of Nikon's new full-frame, wide-angle zoom--on a Canon. Comparison to Canon 24mm prime lens and Sigma 12-24 zoom.
• Photo Business News and Forum: Nikon vs. Canon - A side-by-side comparison of the Nikon D3 and the Canon 1Ds Mark III, plus some closing words anticipating a higher-end D3x supposedly due in the spring of 2008.
• National Press Photographers Association objects to filming ban in national parks - Free-press objections raised during hearing on "New Fees for Filming and Photography on Public Land"; NPPA thinks Interior Department's proposed new regulations would expand restrictions on still photography, too.
• Weird Martian landscape textures - NASA's latest wacky views of Mars. Warning: big download.
• Adobe Labs: Adobe Flash Player 9 Update for Solaris Released on Labs - Adobe's Flash is for Solaris, too. One of those necessary pieces for the long-term health of the operating system.
• North American Mammals: Search Family Tree - Cool Smithsonian navigable family tree for North American mammals. Kim picked colored orchids for Ginger Smith.

IBM's T-Rex mainframe helped restore the high-end server line to relevance, as did its ability to run Linux. Next up: Solaris?

(Credit: IBM)

Free-wheeling Linux was an improbable enough operating system to be used on IBM's mainframe line, but now an even more unlikely operating system is making an appearance there: Sun Microsystems' Solaris.

Sun and IBM have been archenemies for decades, but through the combination of open-source flexibility and something of a detente between the companies, the operating system has arrived. IBM expressed interest in collaborating with engineering firm Sine Nomine Associates, which has been working on a mainframe translation of OpenSolaris since Sun opened the source code in 2005. Now Sine Nomine is demonstrating the software on a System z mainframe.

David Boyes, Sine Nomine's president and chief technologist, described the project (code-named Sirius) for SearchDataCenter.com in a quintet of YouTube videos (first, second, third, fourth, and fifth) from a Gartner conference this week. The actual demonstration, including a pretty pokey boot process and not yet including network support, is in the fourth and fifth videos.

The OpenSolaris port is designed to use the same interface as Linux, Boyes said, meaning that software written for Linux on the mainframe should work on OpenSolaris, too. As with Linux, the operating system runs atop IBM's z/VM virtual-machine foundation rather than on the "bare metal," which eases issues of sharing hardware with other operating systems.

When the software is more mature, making a business case for using it will of course be another challenge entirely. But even absent that real-world relevance, the move does illustrate some success in Sun's ambition to spread Solaris more widely by making it open-source.

Sun's previous chief executive, Scott McNealy, jabbed competitors mercilessly, but his successor, Jonathan Schwartz, has taken a more diplomatic tone, signing Solaris partnerships with Dell and IBM, a chip-supply deal with Intel, and a Windows partnership with Microsoft.

(Via Mainframe Weblog.)

Trying to install Solaris in the past was one of those experiences that made me pine for a prebuilt virtual machine disk format. A new version of Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris-based operating system, though, attempts to amend that.

As of Monday, Solaris Express Developer Edition is now in its third version, craftily named 9/07. Sun gave the installation routine, for the first time in 12 years, "a complete and massive rewrite," said Dan Roberts, director marketing for Solaris and OpenSolaris. The new installer has the same plumbing underneath, but presents a much less technically nitty-gritty interface. However, it's still a first crack and will develop, he added.

"We were seeing significant issues getting started using Solaris, especially for those not previously familiar with Solaris or other Unix operating systems--folks who grew up in a Linux or Windows culture," Roberts said. "They were looking at Solaris and finding it fairly dated in certain aspects."

Solaris Express Developer Edition is derived from the open-source OpenSolaris project, plus some proprietary bits such as fonts thrown in where necessary. Sun intends this version to be more usefully up to date than Solaris 10, fully production ready and supported for 12 years

It looks like Solaris Express Developer Edition will be superseded by Sun's Project Indiana in coming months. That version also is based on OpenSolaris and geared to be more palatable to a newer generation of Linux-steeped developers, but it's also intended to involve more outside programmers.

Of replacing Solaris Express Developer Edition with Indiana, Roberts said, "It is the natural evolution."

The new Solaris Express Developer Edition also includes the Gnome 2.18 (a generation (update: not two generations) behind the freshly released 2.20 version) graphical interface, more wireless network support, better support for Intel power management features, and more elaborate technical support for those who need it.

SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems, a longtime participant in the Xen open-source hypervisor project, has named its Solaris-based offshoot xVM, short for x86 Virtual Machine.

"Because Xen is trademarked, we don't want to call the code we've implemented Xen," said Marc Hamilton, Sun's vice president of Solaris marketing, on Wednesday. It works only on computers with x86 chips such as Intel's Xeon; those with Sun's newer UltraSparc processors use an equivalent technology called logical domains, or LDoms.

Virtualization, blossoming as a technology foundation for x86 servers, lets a single computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously to increase data center efficiency and flexibility. It's a decades-old technology, but it's now spreading like wildfire across the x86 server world. Most of the flames are coming from newly public VMware, which held its VMworld conference here this week.

Xen governs how virtual machines get access to hardware resources, typically relying on Linux for technology used to actually communicate with that hardware. xVM, though, is a variation that uses Sun's Solaris operating system instead. Hamilton boasted on his blog last week that Sun's variant shows some performance improvements over Linux-based Xen.

xVM is a part of the open-source incarnation of Solaris, OpenSolaris, but has yet to be moved to the slower-moving and fully supported Solaris geared for production use. But it could be arriving in production environments soon in one form called an appliance.

VMware has touted virtual appliances as a way to neatly package operating systems with higher-level software. Sun sees the same potential but takes it a step further, with hardware thrown into the mix, Hamilton said.

"We expect that (xVM) will first show up in the form of virtual appliances in the next 12 months," Hamilton said. "There is a lot of complexity to running any virtual environment."

xVM will be fully integrated into Solaris with the first release of Project Indiana, the Linux-like incarnation of OpenSolaris led by Debian Linux founder Ian Murdock. The first version of Indiana is due about March 2008, Hamilton said.

One prominent feature of Indiana is packaging software designed to make it easier to download and install new software or updates to existing packages. The software, called Universal Packaging System (UPS), resembles the apt-get software used in Debian and Debian offshoots such as Ubuntu.