Sun seems to be finally simplifying the Solaris distribution landscape. There was OpenSolaris (the regular, twice yearly edition, all ‘free’ code), Solaris Express Community Edition (aka “Solaris Nevada”, build on some non-free stuff), Open Solaris Developer Edition, etc. Nevada was running mostly in parallel to Solaris 10 – standard packages and build structures. Stuff was being back ported from Nevada to Solaris 10, or side-loaded into OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris, on the other hand, was built on a newer packing system (IPS) and was trying to be more Ubuntu like. Better designed for the end user to pick up and actually… use. Of course, the end user hasn’t really been a focus of Sun’s for awhile – they stopped selling desktop SPARC workstations some time ago, and my guess is when Oracle finished the purchase, they’ll kill off Sun’s X86 workstations that make Apple’s Mac Pro’s look like a bargin.

I’m rambling. The news is – Sun is getting rid of the Nevada style builds. They are moving all their development efforts into OpenSolaris builds, and will still release on a two week cycle, with major releases every 6 months. This means the best way to get your hands on the most recent COMSTAR, ZFS, DTrace or CIFS server bits will be to go the OpenSolaris route, and set your package manager to ‘development’.

Better worded post.

The end result for me – I’m going to have to go in and upgrade my Solaris Nevada boxes (both running b101) to OpenSolaris. I’m reluctant to do this, mostly because I’m comfortable with what I’m running, but this is the future. Sun has told us that the next version of Solaris will look very much like OpenSolaris. That future seems bright to me.