Jim Laurent's Weblog

Many of you have previously seen my comparison chart for Solaris 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and MS Windows 2003, all of which can be purchased from Sun running on Sun hardware.  All of the current open source development effort for Solaris is going on in the OpenSolaris community and Sun has produced a binary distribution of OpenSolaris which is available (along with support contracts) at OpenSolaris.com.  

Development from Sun's engineers and outside contributors continues at a fast pace on OpenSolaris and there are hundreds of projects and thousands of community members.  Occasionally, features from OpenSolaris get back ported to Solaris 10 when there is sufficient business case, customer demand and engineering determines that the new feature will not reduce the stability of Solaris 10.  Past examples includes Trusted Extensions, ZFS CPU Caps and more.  Eventually, OpenSolaris with form the basis for the next major version of Solaris with long term support.  In the mean time, you can put OpenSolaris binary distrbution into production today and get support for it from Sun.

With that in mind, I have updated my comparison chart to included OpenSolaris in addition to the other OSes.

Why should you care?

OpenSolaris provides significant new features for Sun users for developers as well as infrastructure operators. Examples include:

• ZFS automatic snapshot
• Network auto configuration
• Image Packaging system and update GUI
• CIFS server in kernel
• Improved Gnome user interface and accessibility
• More GNU utilities.
  

Download it today for Intel and AMD based laptops, workstations or servers.

Try it out with Sun Studio Developer tools, optimized AMP Stack or other open source software in our repository.