Yesterday I installed Solaris Express Developer Edition on my Acer Ferrari 4005 laptop!

It's BEAUTIFUL! 

Over a year ago I installed Solaris Nevada x86 build 30 on this laptop, multiboot with WIndows XP. And I blogged about it. It was very tricky.

So with some anxiety I saved my working directory to a DVD, inserted the SXDE DVD and went thru the install procedure. It was remarkably easy. It was made even easier by following Ginnie Wray's video tutorial.

The installer automatically recognized the Windows XP partition and didn't mess with it. It even included the boot information in the GRUB loader, so at power up I can choose between solaris or windows. Excellent! 

SXDE comes with Thunderbird, Firefox, Sun Studio, Star Office, Net Beans, and much more already installed.

And it looks great! (The background image shown in the screenshot is my own... one of many on my photo blog that you can steal and use yourself.)

A year and a half ago when I installed Nevada build 30 on this laptop, I came to the conclusion that Sun needed to provide a complete package for software developers that installs easily on a laptop, plays well with WIndows and Linux, and contains all the tools a developer would need right out of the box.

Well, here it is!