OpenSolaris 2008.11 and “the slider”
Whoever has a look at things to come once in a while noticed that, downloading and running the up-to-date OpenSolaris ISOs available at genunix.org, OpenSolaris 2008.11, the next (and second) release of Suns revamped new(?) Solaris distribution, is on its way rather well… Phoronix had a thorough look at the new system pointing out a few of the changes introduced with 2008.11; some more information on that to be found here. Using and installing the Live CD is straightforward as it used to be in 2008.05 as well, driver support on my notebook seems to have improved inasmuch as that the last missing piece of hardware (support for my ICH7 audio chipset) now also works out of the box. Same there seems to be a new network interface configuration in place making attaching the OpenSolaris box to (wired and even wireless) network installments quite simple.
But, no matter what, I already found my favorite new feature: On OpenSolaris, now a tool named ‘Time Slider’ integrateds ZFS snapshot functionality with the Nautilus file manager, thus (along with a more clean, straightforward user interface) more than just compensating for the lack of Mac OS X’ ‘Time Machine’ feature. Good to see Sun folks managed this kind of integration to, asides a pretty convenient user interface, also make some of the features that make OpenSolaris excel available and visible to desktop users. Good job.