Solaris XDE 1/08, Nexenta Core 1.0
For the first time in 2008, the Solaris Express Developers Edition has seen an updated release which is available both for download (*.iso and VMWare image) and as a DVD kit to be ordered free of charge directly from Sun. Looking at the features list, SXDE 1/08 seems to be right the OS for everyone mainly into development work as the distribution comes packed with a whole load of servers, programming languages, SQL databases and of course the latest release of NetBeans IDE. Maybe this is not that much of interest given that most of the up-to-date GNU/Linux distributions actually do provide a similar set of tools and features, one thing makes this release worth looking at, to me: Making my way through the ‘Sun Device Detection Tool’, it seems that by now I am finally able to use most of the hardware in my notebook with a recent Solaris release:
Pretty good, now I’m waiting for the DVD to get started. 🙂 Elsewhere, next to this, one of my virtual machines right now is installing Nexenta Core Platform, an attempt to build an Ubuntu/Debian like Unix distribution around the OpenSolaris kernel, which also has seen its first stable release just by now. Overally, (Open)Solaris seems to be gaining momentum once again, which is a good thing. Looking forward for things to come…