Oracle Solaris 11 Express Was Just Released

After many months of uncertainty about the future of Solaris / OpenSolaris following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, this past August there was an announcement of Oracle effectively killing OpenSolaris while being committed to Solaris as an enterprise operating system and standing behind that, but in a much different form than what we had with Sun Microsystems. Coming out of this was Illumos coming about as an OpenSolaris fork (followed a month later by OpenIndiana) and the OpenSolaris board killing itself. Now though there's a new chapter to Solaris with the immediate release of Oracle Solaris 11 Express.

Oracle Solaris 11 Express arrived today as a surprise -- there wasn't any beta or release candidates available publicly prior -- and it's in a different state where OpenSolaris was left to rot. New features in Oracle Solaris 11 Express include encryption and de-duplication support for the ZFS file-system, network-based packaging and provisioning systems, NUMA-based I/O optimizations, support for Intel Nehalem CPUs, and many other changes. This is the first proper Solaris release with the IPS-based packaging system born out of Ian Murdock's Project Indiana with the original OpenSolaris OS release, ZFS snapshot slider management, installer improvements, and years worth of other advancements.

Oracle OpenSolaris 11 Express 2010.11 is using the GNOME 2.30 desktop, Mozilla Firefox 3.6, the CUPS printing server replacing LP, etc. The OpenSolaris 11 Express 2010.11 release can be downloaded at Oracle.com where other information on this operating system release can be found.

Along with Oracle's other software products, the OpenSolaris 11 Express release carries these licensing terms. Of course, the part that we hate bars us from doing any benchmarks. "You may not disclose results of any benchmark test results related to the Programs without our prior consent." The Phoronix Test Suite works on Solaris/OpenSolaris (along with Linux / Mac OS X / Windows / FreeBSD) and are very excited to benchmark Solaris 11 Express to see what the performance of Solaris 11 is like compared to the competition. Once we are done with Oracle Solaris 11 Express benchmarks, we'll try to get permission from Oracle to release them.