Solaris Express Community Edition Build 93

Two weeks back we had looked at Solaris Express Community Edition b91 to explore some of the recent OpenSolaris advancements. We weren't completely satisfied with SXCE as many of the features found in OpenSolaris 2008.05 were yet to be back-ported into Solaris Express Community. In addition, many of the packages shipping with this build were out-of-date. The good news is that SXCE Build 93 has been released this week and a number of these packages have been updated. We have screenshots in this article from SXCE Build 93 as well as a brief look at the major changes.

Sadly, Solaris Express Community Edition has yet to integrate the work done within Project Caiman for a LiveCD/LiveDVD mode or an improved installer. However, the big update to the OpenSolaris code-base since SXCE Build 91 is upgrading against GNOME 2.22. While GNOME 2.22 was released back in March, Solaris users have been bound to the older GNOME 2.20 release up until now. The GNOME desktop running in SXCE Build 93 is GNOME 2.22.2 and the other GNOME-related packages are upgraded to their latest versions.

GNOME has been upgraded, but one major software package that is still running behind is Firefox. Mozilla had released Firefox 3.0 last month, but SXCE is still running with Firefox 2.0. Other recently updated packages are GIMP 2.4.5 and Pidgin 2.4.2.