Sun Provides Starter Kit for OpenSolaris, Puts Out Developer Edition

Published: March 15, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In an effort to make it easier for people to play around with the open source variant of the Solaris Unix platform, OpenSolaris, the project and its main benefactor, Sun Microsystems, announced at the first OpenSolaris Developer Conference (held in Berlin) that the project's site will now be able to kick out DVDs containing OpenSolaris.

All you have to do to get a starter kit is go to http://get.opensolaris.org/ and the project's systems will kick out a set of OpenSolaris binary code for Sparc and X64 platforms, plus the documentation, source code, and tutorials for newbies, and spin it onto a DVD. The DVDs are, like a similar starter kit for the Ubuntu distribution of Debian Linux, available for free--including delivery of the DVD to any part in the world. It is unclear who is picking up the tab for the DVD burning and the postage. Just don't tell Sun's chief executive officer, Jonathan Schwartz, or his office mate, chief financial officer Michael Lehman, and there shouldn't be a problem.

Sun also recently announced that Solaris Express, the means that Sun has used for the past several years to test beta versions of the production-level Solaris platform, has been rebranded as Solaris Express Developer Edition. This is the first beta version of Solaris that is based on the OpenSolaris "Nevada" update to Solaris 10, which will presumably come to market as Solaris 11. This developer edition is only available on X86 and X64 platforms, but Sun says that those working from Sparc machines can get similar functionality if they download Solaris Express Community Edition at the Build 55 level. The developer edition will eventually support Sparc platforms, and currently supports VMware's virtual machine partitioning. The developer edition includes the Studio 11 integrated developer environment, the NetBeans Java IDE, the Solaris "AMP" stack (Apache, MySQL, and PHP), and another 150 other open source applications that run on Solaris.

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