An Early Look At OpenSolaris 2008.11

The packaging system for OpenSolaris is IPS, or the Image Packaging System. The graphical-based package manager front-end hasn't received any major revisions within this early copy of Jericho, but there are numerous IPS bugs that have been addressed. There are over 30 IPS-specific bugs that have been taken care of such as missing dependencies for the virt-manager package, language support clusters, and an updating of IPS using IPS fails.

Also addressed in this OpenSolaris development update are several installer-related fixes. Developed within the OpenSolaris Community was Project Caiman, which provides a top-notch installation experience and is almost as good as Ubuntu's Ubiquity. Caiman also provides the Live CD/DVD media capabilities and integrated hardware compatibility testing. The Caiman installer is a much-needed (and significant) improvement over what can be found within Solaris 10 or even Solaris Express. For some users, the Caiman installer would crash after three seconds, but this issue has been resolved as well as leaving excess files within /, changing the locale drop-down label, and micro-root overflows after IPS changes.

This early copy of OpenSolaris 2008.11 also has new language clusters for 29 different languages. Among them are Chinese, Dutch, English, French, Italian, Norwegian, and Spanish. Right now OpenSolaris 2008.11 is continuing to use X Server 1.3.0 with no updates yet for X Server 1.4.0 / 1.4.1 or the upcoming X Server 1.5.0 / X.Org 7.4 release.

If you're interested in trying out these latest OpenSolaris development packages, the announcement made by Sun's David Comay along with Bit Torrent download links and IPS upgrade instructions can be found on the OpenSolaris Forums. As mentioned by David Comay, these development builds have undergone limited testing and aren't recommended for production environments. As development efforts toward OpenSolaris 2008.11 "Jericho" heat up, we'll be publishing additional articles looking at this Sun operating system. OpenSolaris 2008.11 is scheduled for release this November.

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