OpenIndiana is a distribution of illumos, which is a community fork of OpenSolaris. And OpenSolaris itself was the open source version of Solaris, before it was discontinued by Oracle, after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, Inc., in January 2010.

The current stable release of PC=BSD available for download is version 8.1. Version 8.2 is due sometime very early next year (mid to late January is the likely release time frame), and version 9 much later. A snapshot release of version 9 has just been made available for download and testing. SysInstaller, PC-BSD’s installation program, will pack more features than the current version.

As a desktop distribution built atop FreeBSD, PC-BSD makes available to the desktop user all the cool technologies inside FreeBSD. One of those cool technologies is ZFS, the Zettabyte File System, a file system developed by Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle Corporation) for the Solaris operating system. ZFS has no parallel in the Linux/BSD world.

Two days ago, I ran through a long needed image update to the OpenSolaris 2010.03 preview. I was updating through the pkg update manager from build 129 to build 134. So when I say, it was much needed, I wasn’t kidding. Anyway, after over 1 GBytes of updates was completed, a new boot environment (BE) was created with the native ZFS snapshot feature and I shut down the PC for the night.

The FreeNAS developers have announced the availability of version 0.7 of FreeNAS (code named Khasadar), a FreeBSD-based Network-attached storage (NAS) UNIX-like server operating system. FreeNAS includes a full Web configuration graphical user interface (GUI) and supports the FTP, NFS, CIFS (Samba), AFP, rsync and iSCSI protocols and software RAID (0,1,5).

Apple has closed down its project to develop ZFS for Mac OS X. An announcement on the project's site simply says "The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly".

You may have read in News Picks recently that Sun won a partial stay in the NetApp patent lawsuit over ZFS, according to IP Law 360:A judge has partly stayed software company Network Appliance Inc.'s patent lawsuit against rival Sun Microsystems Inc. over Sun's ZFS technology, pending the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's re-examination of one of the patents in the suit.

Now I may just be showing my geek side a bit here, but file systems are awesome. Aside from the fact our machines would be nothing without them, the science behind them is frequently ingenious. And ZFS (the Zettabyte File System) is no different. It has quite an extensive feature set just like its peers, but builds on this by adding a new layer of simplicity.