A Tour Of Sun's Project Indiana Preview 2

On the Internet connectivity side are more applications that can be found in nearly any GNOME desktop: Evolution, Firefox, Pidgin, Thunderbird, and Ekiga. In contrast to Solaris 10 and Solaris Express, Project Indiana doesn't ship the Adobe Flash plug-in for Firefox, so that will need to be installed manually. As would be expected from Sun though, Project Indiana ships with the Java 1.6 browser plug-in.

For basic multimedia needs are Rhythmbox and Totem, but there are no proprietary audio/video codecs shipping with Project Indiana so those too will need to be installed manually for a full-featured desktop.

The only office application shipping on the Project Indiana Developer Preview 2 CD is the Evince Document Viewer. Neither AbiWord nor OpenOffice/StarOffice is included by default in this distribution. While there are Web 2.0 text editors for the browser, it's a credible problem that there is no word processor on this desktop distribution.

Also lacking in Project Indiana is a graphical-based package manager. Indiana uses IPS (Image Packaging System) for its network package management needs, but no GUI front-end is yet integrated into this distribution. On the development side, Sun is working towards being able to ship OpenSolaris with Sun Studio, but due to legal reasons, they are not yet able to do so. Aside from the mentioned packages, that about wraps up the primary package set of applications shipping with this second preview release, and not much in the way of the packages themselves have changed in this release.