A Weekend Look At OpenSolaris 2009.06

It has been a while since last talking about OpenSolaris 2009.06 at Phoronix, but this weekend we decided to fire up Sun's latest build based upon the SXCE 111a build available from Genunix. Enclosed are a few screenshots and other information about this Sun community operating system that should be officially released within a month.

Since last looking at OpenSolaris 2009.06 not much has changed in the way of package versions. OpenSolaris 2009.06 is still using the GNOME 2.24 packages rather than the 2.26 packages that were released back in March. GNOME 2.26 brought the official integration of the Brasero CD/DVD disc burning application, PulseAudio / Sound Preferences integration, and numerous other features, so it is a bit unfortunate that these newer packages were incorporated in time.

While the GNOME packages are not up-to-date, the Firefox package is bleeding edge. Mozilla Firefox 3.5 has not been released yet (though it is anticipated it will be sometime this quarter), but Sun Microsystems is tracking this latest code in the 2009.06 release. In the build of OpenSolaris 2009.06 we tried, we were using Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Beta 3. On the other hand, Mozilla Thunderbird remains in the 2.0 series. The latest version of the Pidgin instant messaging program (v2.5.5) is also installed by default.

Besides the updated packages, OpenSolaris 2009.06 has a few improvements to their package management interfaces for the Image Packaging System. Additionally, Fluendo's Codeina is installed on OpenSolaris to provide legal multimedia codec support for those applications using G-Streamer. There is also an improved ZFS snapshot time-slider for Nautilus in the 2009.06 release, which was a feature first introduced in OpenSolaris 2008.11. Compared to earlier builds, there is also new artwork on the desktop. Sadly, no kernel mode-setting has yet to arrive for OpenSolaris.

For more information on OpenSolaris visit OpenSolaris.com and in a few weeks we will have more information as the OpenSolaris 2009.06 release nears.

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