Lenz Grimmer's blog

There have been several similar articles to this one, but I find it pretty amazing to see all these emerging and established Solaris/OpenSolaris distributions. It's a good sign of a healthy community!

So here is my collection - please let me know if I forgot one.

Maintained by Sun Microsystems:

• Solaris 10: The commercial, production-ready and full supported version, similar to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).
• OpenSolaris: This is the "official" OpenSolaris distribution, developed & supported by Sun. Can be compared to Fedora or openSUSE Linux - this is the version which will become the basis of future "Enterprise" releases with a different support and maintenance model. The developers aim on publishing a release roughly every six months.
• Solaris Express: Community Edition (SX:CE): is Sun's periodically built unsupported distribution of OpenSolaris (along with many additional open-source and a few closed-source components necessary to make a complete installable system). However, it looks as if Sun plans to discontinue the production of this version soon.
• Solaris Express: Sun's official distribution of OpenSolaris. These are provided primarily for customers interested in trying out new features of the Solaris release currently under development without the total cutting-edge-ness of the Solaris Express: Community Edition

Third-party distributions (in alphabetical order):

• AuroraUX: A core operating system for high integrity scientific computing. AuroraUX is a Solaris-derived kernel- and user- land. The core of the project are its utilities written in Ada. When necessary, poorly implemented features get fixed or rewritten, as well.
• Belenix: BeleniX is an OpenSolaris Distribution with a Live CD (runs directly off the CD). It can be installed to harddisk and is free to use, modify and distribute.
• Embedded Operating system/Networking (EON): A RAM-based live ZFS NAS appliance (CIFS/NFS/Samba) that boots from USB.
• Jaris: An OpenSolaris derivative suitable for Japanese users, providing a windows-like environment. (The web site is available in Japanese only)
• Korona: A live DVD distribution based on OpenSolaris, but using KDE 4.3 as the default desktop.
• Martux: A barebones OpenSolaris distribution for SPARC
• MilaX: MilaX is a small size Live CD distribution which runs completely off a miniCD, bootable business card or USB flash drive.
• Nexenta Core: Basically an OpenSolaris Kernel with an Ubuntu/GNU userland (including an improved version of apt-get that utilizes ZFS snapshots to perform rollbacks of failed upgrades)
• SchilliX: The very first independent OpenSolaris-based distribution (seems like it's not maintained anymore)
• StormOS: an OpenSolaris desktop distribution, based on Nexenta Core

Some time ago I posted a compilation of applications and programming languages that provide an API to connect to the MySQL Server. As it turned out, I forgot a few that I would like to mention here:

• Apache DBD API: a MySQL driver for mod_apr_dbd is not included in the official distribution, but can be obtained seperately from here. Some distributions (e.g. openSUSE) actually provide installable packages of this driver module.
• GRASS MySQL driver: The MySQL database driver in GRASS enables GRASS applications to store vector attributes in a MySQL server. Alternatively, data can be stored in an embedded version of the MySQL Server.
• HDBC: HDBC provides an abstraction layer between Haskell programs and SQL relational databases. This lets you write database code once, in Haskell, and have it work with any number of backend SQL databases.
• libdrizzle: This is the client and protocol library for Drizzle and MySQL that provides both client and server interfaces. A number of APIs (e.g. Java, Lua, Perl and Ruby as well as Python) have been built on top of it, but I'm not quite sure if they all support the MySQL client/server protocol as well.
• MySQL Connector/Python: MySQL Connector/Python is implementing the MySQL Client/Server protocol completely in Python. This means you don't have to compile anything - the MySQL client library doesn't even have to be installed on your system.

Do you know of any other MySQL Connectors/APIs? Let me know!

I'm happy to announce that the schedule for OpenSQL Camp 2009 (European Edition) has been published on the FrOSCon timetable now. We have a great selection of topics and speakers, so don't miss it! OpenSQL Camp is a subconference of FrOSCon, the Free and Open Source Conference, which will take place on August 22nd and 23rd in St. Augustin, Germany.

The admission fee for the entire conference (both days, incl. OpenSQL Camp) is 5 EUR, you can pre-register here until August 10th (and if you do so today, you will still get a free T-Shirt as well!). Of course, you can also just show up at the entrance and pay the entrance fee on site. The OpenSQL Camp will be located in Room C120 - see the instructions on the FrOSCon web page on how to get there and where to find accommodation.

In case you can't make it to Germany for the European Edition, Eric Day and Selena Deckelmann have started to organize another OpenSQL Camp in Portland, Oregon which will take place on November 14th and 15th. More details can be found on the OpenSQL Camp Wiki. Space is limited to 120 attendees, so sign up today and reserve your spot!