Sun's Project Indiana Out By Month's End

We last talked about Project Indiana a month ago during the Intel Developer Forum when Ian Murdock was there talking about this OpenSolaris binary distribution. However, this past week was the OpenSolaris Developer Summit in Santa Cruz, California. This first-ever summit was a collaborative meeting to plan for the first release of Project Indiana. On the Project Indiana mailing list are a few details from the summit as well as some slides, summaries, and recordings. We have summarized some of the most interesting bits of information below.

The first Project Indiana milestone will use GNOME 2.20, but KDE 4.0 libraries may possibly be included in order to support more existing applications on the desktop. Since 4Front Technologies open-sourced OSS earlier in the year, version 4.0 of the Open Sound System will be the audio architecture for Project Indiana. At the OpenSolaris Developer Summit, the hopes for the Solaris installer were compared to that of Fedora's Revisor where one can easily spin their own distribution or create a LiveCD and change out different packages. It also sounds like Ian Murdock would like to make Project Indiana LSB (Linux Standards Base) compliant. For "eye candy" on the desktop, Project Indiana will be using Compiz.

Some of the repeated information includes: enhanced laptop support, the use of the ZFS file-system, improved package management, Caiman installer, and compatibility with older Solaris applications. More information from the OpenSolaris Developer Summit is available on the Indiana discussion list. Talking code-names, OpenSolaris 3/08 will be called Indiana and OpenSolaris 9/08 will be called Jerico. Project Indiana Milestone One, which is geared to be an early "developer preview" of Project Indiana, will be out by the end of October. So within the next week or two when the first Project Indiana release pops out, we'll be back with more information. You can discuss Project Indiana in the Phoronix Forums.