Louwrentius

With the probable loss of OpenSolaris, there may be another, maybe more devastating loss.

The very popular and very advanced Zetabyte File System (ZFS)

The only open source platform that actively supports ZFS is FreeBSD. And they just 'copied' the code from OpenSolaris. Are they able to maintain and further develop ZFS on their own? I don't think the community can handle a thing like that. Development on ZFS will severely be hampered and will not continue in the pace it did.

It is also clear that Oracle doesn't give a shit about open source or open operating systems. That is ok with me, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. But keep this in mind when you decide to use any Oracle product whatsoever.

It's not that I'm suggesting that you should not buy Oracle stuff. I have no grudge against Oracle in any way, it is just an objective observation, just be aware of this issue.

From the perspective of Oracle: what is their benefit regarding OpenSolaris? I understand their decision, but its sad nevertheless. And I'm really scared for the future of ZFS.

The last release of OpenSolaris dates back to July 2009. The next release was scheduled for March 2010, but Oracle did not release anything. It is dead silent around OpenSolaris.

On 12 July 2010, the OpenSolaris Government Board sent out an ultimatum to Oracle: "please communicate with us or we will resign and hand over the little power we have back to Oracle".

These are all signs that OpenSolaris has no real future. And think about it: what is Oracle's interest in OpenSolaris? Maintaining an operating system and develop new features is extremely expensive. What is their benefit? I can't see any. Sun was a hardware manufacturer and promoting OpenSolaris made sure that people got experience with the operating system that powers their hardware.

Unless your environment already consists of Solaris-based systems, as of 2010, there is no reason to use Solaris any more. OpenSolaris was, until recent, the only operating system that supported ZFS natively, so the only choice if you really wanted to use ZFS. Now FreeBSD has native support for ZFS too.

For the people who are fanatical about ZFS this is great, because it would be a shame if ZFS could only be used in combination with a dead operating system that supports less hardware than Mac OS X.

But I see no future in OpenSolaris and you should think twice about running it, either as a production platform or at home. Use a platform that has a large user-base and a big community.

I think that if you are running OpenSolaris, you must start thinking about migrating to FreeBSD or Linux, however painful that may be.

In this post I will show you how to compile Handbrake for Debian Lenny. Please note that although the Handbrake GUI version does compile on Lenny, it crashes with a segmentation fault like this:

Gtk: gtk_widget_size_allocate(): attempt to allocate widget with width -5 and height 17

(ghb:1053): GStreamer-CRITICAL **: gst_element_set_state: assertion `GST_IS_ELEMENT (element)' failed

(ghb:1053): GStreamer-CRITICAL **: gst_element_set_state: assertion `GST_IS_ELEMENT (element)' failed

(ghb:1053): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_get: assertion `G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

Segmentation fault

So this post only describes how to compile the command-line version of Handbrake: HandBrakeCLI.

• Issue the following apt-get commando to install all required libraries and software:

apt-get install subversion yasm build-essential autoconf libtool zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev intltool libglib2.0-dev libpthread-stubs0-dev

1. Download the source code at http://sourceforge.net/projects/handbrake/files/

2. Extract the source code and cd into the new handbrake directory.

3. Compile handbrake like this:

./configure --disable-gtk --launch --force --launch-jobs=2

The --launch-jobs parameter determines how many parallel threads are used for compiling Handbrake, based on the number of CPU cores of your system. If you have a quad-core CPU you should set this value to 4.

The resulting binary is called HandBrakeCLI and can be found in the ./build directory. Issue a 'make install' to install this binary onto your system.