OpenSolaris 2008.05 Gives A New Face To Solaris

The Device Driver Utility in OpenSolaris shows all of the system components along with driver information and hardware information such as the vendor and device IDs.

In the last Project Indiana article, we criticized it for the lack of a graphical front-end for the IPS packaging system. Fortunately though in this release is a GUI Package Manager for the Image Packaging System. This manager is laid out in a similar fashion to apt's Synaptic Package Manager. Packages can be sorted by category, search, ordered in various ways, and can be sorted by different repositories. This OpenSolaris Package Manager (it's just called packagemanager) has been developed by Sun and is currently at version 0.1. This graphical-based package manager worked out quite well in our initial tests and we are very pleased with its addition in time for the 2008.05 release.

The test copy of OpenSolaris 2008.05 is shipping with GIMP 2.4.1, Mozilla Firefox 2, and Pidgin 2.1. It's a bit unfortunate that Pidgin 2.1 is being used instead of the more recent Pidgin 2.4 release, which introduces a number of new features.