Frank Sommers: What is the Solaris Express, Developer Edition about?

Dan Roberts: We announced today the third release of Solaris Express, Developer Edition. Solaris Express Developer Edition is a quarterly release of the latest open-source code from the OpenSolaris project. The OpenSolaris project doesn't itself build a distribution, but is a repository and a community for the evolving Solaris operating system. Many companies build a variety of different distributions from that source base, and one of them is Sun.

Every quarter, Sun takes the latest innovations that have come into the OpenSolaris community, wraps it up with a little bit of QA, and delivers it as Solaris Express Developer Edition. We also add various developer tools to ensure that developers have a great experience right out of the box.

Frank Sommers: What's new in this release?

Dan Roberts: New in this release is the first true re-write of the Solaris installer since we released Solaris twelve years ago. When we did the first version of Solaris Express, Developer Edition, we simplified the existing installer, cut out a couple of screens, but it was still the old installer. We didn't have time then to finish the re-write. This release is a complete re-write: modern look, modern feel, intuitive questions, and a vastly simplified experience.

We're specifically targeting those folks who have never installed Unix, or may have never installed Linux, and are only familiar with very modern graphical installers. We are hoping this way to enable those developers to benefit from the innovations we've been introducing in Solaris, and that have been very difficult previously to gain access to.

The deployment model is simply that you go to http://www.sun.com/sxde, and download the bits. In addition to the download, we are also offering free media, which we will ship to your house anywhere in the world, at no charge. We offer a very slim DVD media kit. The target is largely the x86 platform, and almost any system manufactured in the last three years will work with this. We've also been releasing VMware and Parallels images for Solaris Express in the past couple of releases. Those should be available in the next couple of days, along with an image for Xen.

Frank Sommers: Many developers using Solaris in the past as their primary development platform were somewhat frustrated with the relatively poor usability of the UI, especially compared with other modern OSs. Another sore spot was lack of device driver support. What improvements are there in the latest Solaris release to address these concerns?

Dan Roberts: We've been spending a lot of time over the past several releases on improving support for different device types. The first release was about simplifying the installer, the second release was all about wireless driver support, as we had seen people installing Solaris on laptops in increasing numbers. We delivered some technology to help manage your wireless networking, as well as wireless cards. We also delivered support for a host of new sound cards, as well as updates for new varieties of graphics cards. We have partnerships with several leading graphics device vendors to ensure that we continue to provide support for the latest cards.

The basic user experience is very similar those of advanced Linux systems. The first thing you will find is the installer, which is very modern and intuitive. Once you have the system up and running, you will find the Gnome UI and desktop manager, and we added many small details to Gnome to make it even more appealing. You get a lot of the functionality that you expect from any modern desktop: IRC chat channel tools, there is instant messaging tools, MP3 players, all the things that you would expect in a modern desktop. Previously, all those things had to be configured by you after you installed the OS.

We also integrated a lot of developer tools that you need to build applications, whether it be C, C++, Java, even Fortran. Those tools include the NetBeans IDE, with all of its various developer packs, and we also include Sun Studio, which is for C/C++ and Fortran development.

We also released a new tool, improving the ease-of-use of DTrace. DTrace, along with ZFS, is probably the most written-about technology that we delivered in Solaris 10. There are other rather interesting ones, but DTrace gets a lot of interest. While it's greatly deserved, the technology was exposed via a command-line interface, and you had to write various scripts to actually utilize it. We created a new tool, DLight, which is a full graphical environment for building, running, and writing DTrace scripts, which will be far easier for developers to understand and start taking advantage of.