Blastwave.org is a privately-held corporation specialized in building and supporting open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 software packages

Software package (installation)

In package management systems, which are commonly used with Linux-based operating systems, a package is a specific piece of software which the system can install and uninstall....

 for Oracle

Oracle Corporation

Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...

 Solaris, as well as various operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

 distributions based on OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris was an open source computer operating system based on Solaris created by Sun Microsystems. It was also the name of the project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around the software...

. As its primary product, it provides an independent software repository for Solaris in a similar manner to the repositories for Linux distribution

Linux distribution

A Linux distribution is a member of the family of Unix-like operating systems built on top of the Linux kernel. Such distributions are operating systems including a large collection of software applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, media players, and database applications...

s.

The objective of the Blastwave project is to allow Solaris and OpenSolaris users to freely have pre-packaged open source software in accordance with specified standards. Software is in SVR4-compliant package format and ready to run via the simple package utilities such as the open source pkgutil

Pkgutil

Pkgutil, written in Perl and licensed under the GPL, is a tool to make installation of packages in Solaris easier. It handles package dependencies so all required packages are installed before the desired package automatically...

 tool. OpenSolaris-based distributions may also choose to use the Blastwave software set, such as BeleniX

BeleniX

BeleniX is an operating system distribution built using the OpenSolaris source base. It can be used as a Live CD as well as installed to hard disk. From the information provided on the BeleniX website, it may appear that currently, BeleniX is compiled only for 32-bit execution...

 and SchilliX

SchilliX

SchilliX is a Live CD operating system distribution based on OpenSolaris. It was released on 17 June 2005, three days after the first release of OpenSolaris. Its developers claim that it is the first OpenSolaris distribution...

 and AuroraUX

AuroraUX

AuroraUX is a suite of high-integrity applications, libraries and user tools and an operating system distribution based on the DragonflyBSD kernel source base which serves as a reference implementation of the AuroraUX suite and other AUX projects....

.

To date, there are some 2,000 software packages for both the SPARC

SPARC

SPARC is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced in mid-1987....

 and x86/AMD architectures that support Solaris. The software is built to support Solaris 8, 9, and 10. Solaris Nevada as well as Solaris Express Community Edition are not officially supported, however the CSW software set is reported to work well. Older Sun hardware architectures are officially supported, as well as the latest generation Sun UltraSPARC

UltraSPARC

The UltraSPARC is a microprocessor developed by Sun Microsystems who is now a part of Oracle Corporation and fabricated by Texas Instruments that implements the SPARC V9 instruction set architecture . It was introduced in mid-1995. It was the first microprocessor from Sun Microsystems to implement...

 hardware and multi-core AMD Opteron

Opteron

Opteron is AMD's x86 server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture . It was released on April 22, 2003 with the SledgeHammer core and was intended to compete in the server and workstation markets, particularly in the same...

 and Intel Xeon

Xeon

The Xeon is a brand of multiprocessing- or multi-socket-capable x86 microprocessors from Intel Corporation targeted at the non-consumer server, workstation and embedded system markets.-Overview:...

 implementations.

The "Blastwave Software Stack" is a commercial-grade software service product. Software packages are continually being updated and released to the public via the Blastwave mirrors

Mirror (computing)

In computing, a mirror is an exact copy of a data set. On the Internet, a mirror site is an exact copy of another Internet site.Mirror sites are most commonly used to provide multiple sources of the same information, and are of particular value as a way of providing reliable access to large downloads...

. There is also an internal tree simply called "testing" and it is used for QA

Quality Assurance

Quality assurance, or QA for short, is the systematic monitoring and evaluation of the various aspects of a project, service or facility to maximize the probability that minimum standards of quality are being attained by the production process...

 processes before a package enters the new packages stage. The addition of Solaris-native virtualization technology under the brandname "Solaris Containers

Solaris Containers

Solaris Containers is an implementation of operating system-level virtualization technology for x86 and SPARC systems, first released publicly in February 2004 in build 51 beta of Solaris 10, and subsequently in the first full release of Solaris 10, 2005.It is present in newer OpenSolaris based...

" allows the Blastwave stack to function within Solaris 8, 9, 10 native zones. This feature ensures that Solaris customers may retain their legacy software investment and also implement the latest LAMP

LAMP (software bundle)

LAMP is an acronym for a solution stack of free, open source software, referring to the first letters of Linux , Apache HTTP Server, MySQL and PHP , principal components to build a viable general purpose web server.The GNU project is advocating people to use the term "GLAMP" since what is known as...

 stack features within those Solaris virtual hosts.

The Blastwave build stack is a set of servers that houses the build environment. This stack allows members of the Solaris and OpenSolaris communities to gain access to both tools and expertise such that they may build software in accordance with set standards. Release is performed continuously and to many mirror sites world wide.

External links

• Blastwave Project Homepage
• Blastwave (The Observatory, blogs.sun.com)