Farewell To Solaris Express Community Edition

Back in August we shared that Sun would be discontinuing SXCE, or formally known as Solaris Express Community Edition. Solaris Express Community Edition for the past five years has served as Sun's delivery mechanism for the latest and greatest Solaris code that will eventually make it into the next Solaris stable release, but earlier this month Sun Microsystems put out their last bi-weekly build of SXCE and as of the end of this week all downloads will cease. OpenSolaris has superseded Solaris Express Community Edition, but with this article, we are taking one last look at Build 130, the final version of Solaris Express Community Edition.

The Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) installer has long been antiquated like the Solaris 10 installer, even as the OpenSolaris project came around with the Caiman installer and a LiveCD mode. SXCE's installer is purely text-based and is quite slow. Installing the entire SXCE operating system had occupied over 10GB on the hard drive. Solaris Express Community Edition was produced for x86 and SPARC systems.

For a historical look at Solaris Express Community Edition, in years past we have provided screenshots and other information, such as with SXCE Build 69 in 2007. Solaris Express Community Edition Build 130 ended out this operating system with GNOME 2.28.1, X.Org Server 1.7.3, and its SunOS 5.11 kernel.