Oracle has made the first release of Solaris 11 Express available for download. The final release will be somewhere next year. It is the first major Solaris release under the governance of Oracle. You can download the OS for free (and for testing). Take care: the default download is a text based installer, scroll down to get a GUI based installer.
New feature digest:
- Image Packaging System (IPS)
- A new software package system
- Repositories (depot servers) providing packages over the network
- mirrors
- can assist in network install (Automated Installer)
- Automatic updates
- legacy solaris packages (pkg) supported
- Distribution constructor builds an OS image from a manifest (descriptor file). Images can be
- directly installed on client
- ISO image
- VM image
- Boot environments: streamlined Live Upgrade using ZFS snapshots
- ZFS
- ZFS boot/root environment
- deduplication: detect duplicate data and store single copy
- encrypted datasets
- security
- root is a role now
- labeling extensions
- apply labels to IPSec
- apply labels to ZFS datasets
- require an extra password to access a labeled resource
- bash is the default user shell, ksh the default system shell
- optional graphical boot screen
- CUPS printing service is the default printing service
- printer discovery
- Open Sound System API support (Boomer)
- Linux removable media management replaces the volume manager (vold)
- Command assistant: full text search tool to get information on Solaris commands
- git is bundled (distributed version control system for development)
- Networking enhancements
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