Vijay Tatkar's Blog

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Wednesday May 07, 2008

OpenSolaris launched and Sun Studio is in the network package repository OpenSolaris is here! Its formal launch at CommunityOne (the day prior to JavaOne in San Francisco) has attracted a lot of attention. It was picked up by The Register (here), Application Developer Trends (here), etc. Comments have ranged from "Cool, this is new and exciting" to "Looks just like Linux" (including the site www.opensolaris.com).
An interesting bit of praise comes from this article in ZDnet, titled What Ubuntu wants to be, when it grows up
OpenSolaris comes with full support, ranging from per incident support to a full 24x7 plan, geared fully towards supporting (as they call it) "from dorm room to the corporate board room".
OpenSolaris used to be called Project Indiana, for those in the community more familiar with that name.

The new distribution includes a small core operating system on a LiveCD, a network package repository, application packages, and the Sun-developed Image Packaging System (IPS) to hold it all together. With a small LiveCD, you can quickly (with just 6 clicks) install a desktop with a core set of utilities to assemble a simple desktop including Firefox and Thunderbird. IPS lets users easily download and install only the OpenSolaris components they want, rather than a monolithic bundle. And IPS also supports current Solaris packages, for backward compatibility. All the old stuff still works the same way. You can add/customize your desktop or server with components you need, as you need them through the network package repository. The classic "packages" are all there in the repository:

Give it a try! I think you'll like it. I know I did and I have it installed now on a Toshiba Tecra laptop and a Sun Ultra 20 Desktop.
Posted by tatkar ( May 07 2008, 10:56:27 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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