Solaris Express Community Edition Build 91

One of the newer packages in Solaris Express Community Edition has been shipping Compiz by default. If you're using the binary-only NVIDIA driver that ships with OpenSolaris or one of the open-source drivers with OpenGL support, Compiz can be utilized quite easily from the GNOME Appearance area and can be tweaked through the Compiz Config Settings Manager.

If you haven't noticed from the screenshots already, Solaris Express Community Edition doesn't yet incorporate the modernized look and feel that can be found within OpenSolaris 2008.05. The default GNOME appearance is the same as what's been within Solaris Express (and Solaris 10) for what seems like an eternity. Compared to Project Indiana, Solaris Express Community continues to lack Network Auto-Magic, the Device Driver Utility, and other key innovations.

One of the more recent innovations going on under the OpenSolaris umbrella is bringing Red Hat's virt-manager and libvirt over to Solaris. The Virtual Machine Manager makes it very easy to create new virtual machine instances, manage guest operating systems, and it offers an embedded VNC client for viewing guest systems. Right now virt-manager just supports Xen. The Virtual Machine Manager had first appeared in Fedora 7 and most recently was included in Ubuntu 8.04. This will be even nicer once virt-manager incorporates Sun's xVM and their other virtualization technologies.

From our encounter with Solaris Express Community Edition Build 91, there really isn't much to get excited over at this time. In fact, OpenSolaris 2008.05 would still be the preferred choice to us, even though SXCE is supposed to highlight the latest OpenSolaris improvements over the past few weeks. The improvements made within OpenSolaris "Project Indiana" haven't made their way back into the Nevada code-base. SXCE has far from a modern feel to it and Project Caiman and other key enhancements that Ian Murdock and his Sun team worked on aren't to be found.