OpenSolaris Project Indiana

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 1 November 2007 at 09:54 AM EDT. Page 3 of 5. 7 Comments.

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One of the other Solaris nightmares (compared to Linux) is package management. In almost every presentation, Ian Murdock had mentioned Debian's apt-get and went on to elaborate how the package management process for OpenSolaris can be improved. Handling the package needs in Project Indiana is the Image Packaging System (IPS) with network repository support and snapshot/fallback capability. That's there with this first Project Indiana milestone, but we feel there is still a ways to go in improving the package management and making it familiar to Linux users -- not to mention there isn't yet an IPS GUI-based package manager. On a similar note, there is also the Distribution Constructor for assembling your own distribution from IPS packages and making other modifications along the way.

The Project Indiana Developer Preview ships with GNOME 2.20.0 as the default desktop environment. Though unlike the heavily modified GNOME theme for Solaris / Solaris Express, the theme is based upon Clearlooks, there are two GNOME panels, and all around it's much more familiar to Linux users.


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