It gives me immense pleasure to announce that OpenSolaris 2008.05 HAS BEEN LAUNCHED at CommunityOne Today!!

Today, Sun has opened an exciting and critical new chapter in it's open source story by announcing the first release of a new binary distribution of the OpenSolaris operating system, OpenSolaris (TM) 2008.05, now available for free download at www.opensolaris.com.

Oh btw, Check out the brand new, AWESOME OpenSolaris.com! :

Here's a message from Rich Green (Executive Vice President, Software at Sun Microsystems):

Today's release launched at CommunityOne marks a fundamental and deliberate change in the way we are packaging and distributing our software for both developers and deployers. We are significantly lowering the barriers to adoption by modernizing our offerings with powerful tools and technologies designed to optimize the user experience, get developers up and running quickly, and encourage community collaboration with some of the greatest innovators on the planet. We are listening to our communities and taking the important next step in building a new level of volume in the enterprise and web economy markets.

OpenSolaris 2008.05 features LiveCD technology, which allows users to experience OpenSolaris immediately without installing the operating system. When users are ready, they can start the fast and easy installation with a single click and simply add software via the new Image Packaging System (IPS). This is a network-based package repository that enables users to easily customize their implementations directly over the network by installing just the packages they need to build, test, trouble-shoot and deploy their innovations. OpenSolaris 2008.05 also includes a compelling new set of features such as Solaris (TM) ZFS, the Solaris default file system that allows users to protect and store their data with a new instant roll-back and continual check-summing capability, Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), which offers real-time debugging and acceleration of application development and Solaris containers, that enable easier development of virtualization-aware applications without worry about 3rd party software compatibility.

Highly scalable, OpenSolaris can be deployed on nearly 1000 systems, ranging from single machines through multi-CPU and multi-core systems, from every major vendor. With this kind of innovation, community engagement, scalability, usability, familiarity and access to Sun's world-class support, OpenSolaris not only opens up a new level of global participation and innovation, it opens enormous long term opportunities for Sun.

I am extremely proud of the efforts made to make today's milestone release possible, but our work is not done. To make mass adoption of OpenSolaris possible, we will need to continue our focus on getting new contributions to our repository packages. Throughout FY09, we will encourage the participation of our internal and external developer communities to build, optimize, and repackage all of Sun's software along, with popular community open source projects, to make OpenSolaris the most innovative, compelling, and comprehensive software system in the market.

Additional Important urls and links:

CommunityOne Launch

JavaOne Information, Schedules of keynotes, sessions

For access to latest OpenSolaris release, www.opensolaris.com

To Learn more about OpenSolaris, installation guide, IPS and other features: http://opensolaris.org/os/community/documentation

How to Participate in OpenSolaris documentation:
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/documentation/feature_docs/

The IPS Getting Started guide is available on OpenSolaris.org:
http://dlc.sun.com/osol/docs/content/IPS/ggcph.html