Solaris Express Developer Edition 1/08

The two integrated development environments shipping with SXDE -- NetBeans and Sun Studio Express -- have been updated in this release. Since the release of SXDE 9/07 has been the release of NetBeans 6.0 and the integration of the D-Trace GUI plug-in. Sun Studio Express 12/07 is based on the NetBeans 6.0 code-base with various improvements. For those planning to use Solaris Express Developer Edition in a high-performance cluster, included in this operating system is Sun's HPC ClusterTools 7.1 edition, which in turn is based upon OpenMPI 1.2.4. Further enriching the development capabilities with SXDE 1/08 is the GlassFish v2 application server and Java 6 Update 3.

Of interest to us, SXDE 1/08 ships with the X server 1.3 and XRandR 1.2. For more on RandR 1.2, check out our RandR newbie's guide. SXDE 1/08 also ships with the RadeonHD driver! The xf86-video-radeonhd driver had appeared in Nevada Build 80 but has been back-ported into Build 79b for this release. However, it's using the v1.0 driver, which is now vastly outdated. We will have more on Solaris and the RadeonHD driver in an article in the coming days. Also on the hardware side, the Intel 3945 802.11g and 4965 802.11a/g/n wireless adapter is supported with this new Solaris Express release. This 4965 802.11n PCI-E Mini wireless adapter is used in the recent Intel notebooks.

Overall, Solaris Express Developer Edition 1/08 is a very nice update for both the Solaris family and open-source world. Specifically what we had like most about this update was the introduction of the Sun xVM hypervisor and the OpenSolaris Web Stack project, which allows anyone to quickly and easily deploy an AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) server using the menu items and a GUI. SXDE goes beyond just providing the server essentials and includes some ready-to-run code samples and developer documentation. Also rounding up this update is an updated version of GNOME and other free software packages including X Server 1.3 with RandR 1.2 support. On the hardware side is improved support for some wireless cards and other devices along with including the xf86-video-radeonhd driver for those using ATI Radeon X1000 or Radeon HD 2000 graphics cards. SXDE 1/08 is so nice that we would continue to choose Solaris Express Developer over Project Indiana Preview 2 for most environments. While this release is great, we are equally excited to see what the next Solaris Express Developer release will have in store for developers and desktop users alike.