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Gentoo Linux plans to add OpenSolaris to Portage

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Gentoo is about to make OpenSolaris available in the popular Linux distributions package management system. The announcement follows Suns announcement of licensing the complete Solaris source code under the OSI-approved CDDL open-source license.

Gentoo/OpenSolaris

Only few hours ahead of the first of many components1 of the complete Solaris source code being publicly released under Sun's brand new, OSI-approved CDDL open-source license, Gentoo is pleased to announce plans to add OpenSolaris2 support to Portage. Gentoo Senior Manager and OpenSolaris pilot program participant, Pieter Van den Abeele, has been working closely with Sun's management, legal and engineering teams to prepare this move. Gentoo will be leveraging the hard work of long-time Solaris users and Gentoo Developers-in-training Sunil Kumar and Jason Wohlgemuth, whose "Portaris" project has been running on top of Solaris 9 and 10 builds for quite a while already3.

  1. http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/01/23/0349259
  2. http://www.opensolaris.org
  3. http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20040202-newsletter.xml#doc_chap4

Figure 1.1: OpenSolaris + Looking Glass - an interesting alternative for the open-source desktop market http://www.gentoo.org/images/gwn/20050124_looking-glass.jpg

With "Sun going back to its roots by open-sourcing the code," Pieter expects OpenSolaris to have a huge impact on the open-source market. "With their service and support network and their expertise, they can redefine at least part of the open-source landscape in the enterprise," says Pieter. And he expects Gentoo to become an important factor for OpenSolaris' success: "We're able to build on prior experience with Gentoo ports to non-Linux operating systems, we've had the technology preview of Gentoo for Mac OS X4, we've got developers working full-time on Opendarwin support, and we're well out of the starting blocks for the race to Gentoo-ifiedBSD kernels and userland applications5," he says. "But even I wasn't quite prepared for my Sparc booting with a Gentoo bootsplash," laughs Pieter.

  1. http://www.metadistribution.org/macos
  2. http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/bsd/

The unofficial Portaris6 or "Portage for Solaris" project has been maintaining Gentoo's package management system on top of Solaris 9 and 10 systems. Its two biggest contributors, Sunil Kumar and Jason Wohlgemuth (who, like Pieter, is a member of Sun's pilot program for open-sourcing Solaris), have invested a tremendous amount of their time in this project, culminating in a veritable installer for Solaris7 that has been available to a small, knowledgeable Solaris user community for several months already.

  1. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=113387
  2. http://dev.gentoo.org/~pvdabeel/solaris9/

From the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of 24 January 2005.

> Linux Reviews > News and headlines > 2005 News archive > January >
Gentoo Linux plans to add OpenSolaris to Portage