A new version of Solaris Express Developer Edition has just been released: SXDE 1/08. It brings a bunch of new features, upgraded software and bug fixes. In fact, there are so many that I don't think I will have the time or energy to describe all of them on this post.

Solaris made easy

I am going to go through which, for me, are the most important features of the release:

xVM: the Sun xVM hypervisor based on the work of the Xen community allows running Solaris, Linux, and Windows virtual machine guests on a Solaris host. It supports the two types of virtualization: full virtualization and paravirtualization . If you think of it, a virtualization mechanism like xVM is very important nowadays, I would even say a basic requirement; and now you have it by default, without having to buy or install any extra software. If you have not used it before I recommended you to start by reading xVM(5) and visiting the Xen community at OpenSolaris.org.

CIFS Server: a native, kernel-based service supporting file sharing in Microsoft Windows networks. Like it or not, it is a defacto standard, so the most pragmatic approach is to provide the best possible implementation in order to make OpenSolaris fit into heterogeneous environments.

Web Stack: It includes all the applications of a common AMP stack (not strictly speaking): Apache, MySQL, PHP, PostgreSQL, Ruby, Python, Squid and HTML Tidy. Besides, I would like to point out that the upcoming 0.6 release of Cherokee - which is not shipped with SXDE - has performing amazingly on SXDE during my tests.

Desktop: The desktop continues improving: GNOME 2.20, Firefox 2.0.0.9, Flash 9, etc. You can even install Compiz with a single command!

And there are many other new features on SXDE 1/08: new NIC drivers (Broadcom NetXtreme II, ADMtek Centaur and Comet chips, Macronix, Davicom and AMD-8111), new wireless drivers (Intel Centrino 3945 and 4965), EIST support, new Xorg, suspend-to-RAM support on x86, architectural changes like /usr/gnu, improved HAL support (USB, Firewire and IDE), StarOffice 8, Xvnc client and server, Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) support, automatic discovery of network attached printers, among many others. :-)