Jim Laurent's Weblog

I'm often asked the relationship between the various Solaris named products that Sun provides.  Here is my view on them:

OpenSolaris is a SOURCE code project at opensolaris.org from which a number of actual products may be derived including:

• Portions of Solaris 10
• Solaris Express and SX Dev. Edition
• xVM Server
• Project Indiana

Solaris Nevada is the portion of Open Solaris community code that includes only the kernel (OS and Networking consolidations). Running uname on this build indicates SunOS 5.11.

Solaris Express Community Edition is Sun's binary release for OpenSolaris developers (code named "Nevada"). It is built from the latest OpenSolaris source and additional technology that has not been published in the OpenSolaris source base. This release is unsupported. Developers can build the OpenSolaris source by using this release as the base system. It is updated every other Friday.

Solaris Express Developers Edition, includes Solaris Express Community Edition along with the development tools (Netbeans, Studio etc) in a single installation to simplify life for developers. The Developer Edition is released every three to four months and replaces the Solaris Express monthly release.

Project Indiana is currently in preview edition two.  The OpenSolaris Developer Preview is the first milestone of Project Indiana. It is a single CD combined live/install image: a core operating system, kernel, system libraries, a desktop environment and a package management system. It is not a final release and is intended for developers to try, test, and provide feedback.

Solaris 10 is our enterprise ready, supported version of Solaris.  It is updated less frequently and provdes a stable platform for deployment of long term applications.
 

They are ALL free to download use in a production environment.  If you need support for Solaris 10 you can choose from a variety of Solaris 10 subscriptions on Sun or non-Sun hardware (Sparc, Intel or AMD based).