Sun Releases OpenSolaris 2008.11

New features, updates to bundled apps, and new community support


December 10, 2008
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/sun-releases-opensolaris-200811/212400086


Sun Microsystems has announced the release of OpenSolaris 2008.11(a little late, but that's alright). I spoke with Timothy Cramer, a senior director of OpenSolaris engineering at Sun, about this release of OpenSolaris, and he told me that it's part of the six-month binary release cycle that Sun has committed to for OpenSolaris. The first one -- OpenSolaris 2008.5 -- was released in May 2008, at CommunityOne/JavaOne; OpenSolaris 2008.11 has been released today, and the next one will be in April 2009. This release is a combination of new features, updates to bundled applications, and new community support offerings (which is the big news with this release). For more information on OpenSolaris, see this Dr. Dobb's interview with Timothy Cramer.

New Features and Updates

Among the new and updated features in OpenSolaris 2008.11 are:

OpenSolaris Community Support

Sun has done a lot of work to help build the community around OpenSolaris. To start, they've added new software repositories. In the past, there was one repository where updates to any portion of OpenSolaris were added about every two weeks under a "buyer beware" policy. With this model, early adopters of these updates ran the risk of getting code that may have broken previously working features, or that impacted overall stability. To avoid this, Sun now offers five different OpenSolaris repositories:

Also new is Package Factory which works like a web crawler or robot, where it automatically crawls and compiles application source code for OpenSolaris. There are about 2000 packages already created by this robot which will be made available with this release.

In addition, Automated Installer is a new application that works with the OpenSolaris Distribution Constructor to create an OS image, and then deploy en-masse to large numbers of servers. This will also aid in creating OpenSolaris-based appliances for embedded use.

The Next Release

After this release, OpenSolaris development will continue to move onward. The April release will include:

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