OpenSolaris 2008.05

OpenSolaris 2008.05 (for x86) was released earlier this month, along with a new OpenSolaris web site (which to me bears more than a passing resemblence to the OpenSUSE web site). I don’t know the difference between that web site and OpenSolaris.org, but somebody must think its worth it.

I’ve already ordered my CD of OpenSolaris 2008.05; now to find something to run it on. Alright already, so that’s backwards – but I’m always trying the new UNIX versions. And why not? This is an excellent way to find out what is likely to be in Solaris 11.

The CD of OpenSolaris 2008.05 is also a live CD, which means you can try it out anywhere the operating system can run: just reboot with the CDROM in the drive.

Jason Perlow of ZDNet wrote a nice review article titled OpenSolaris: What Ubuntu wants to be when it grows up on May 5, 2008. It isn’t a step by step technical review, but it is good nonetheless. Another review was recently written by Ashwin Bhat K S about his experiences with OpenSolaris 2008.05. He used a laptop, so this review is doubly interesting. There is another review by Milind Arun Choudhary which talks about installing OpenSolaris (Nexenta, actually) into a VirtualBox virtual machine under MacOS X.

I can only hope that OpenSolaris driver support will improve; last time I installed it onto a current laptop it had no wifi connectivity and no network connectivity because of missing drivers. Is it any surprise then that Ashwin’s first recommendation is more network drivers and more wifi drivers?

Update: Another person has done up a nice article about installing OpenSolaris 2008.05 – their first and only post apparently!