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kaiwai, you're quite into this whole Solaris thing - could you give me a short list of the different.... Versions there are of Solaris? You of course have the non-Sun initiatives (Belenix for instance) but Sun itself also has a few - Community, Express, and now this Developer thing. It's kinda confusing :s.

Hi Thom, they are actually summarised on the downloads page of opensolaris.org:

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/downloads/
Solaris Express Community Edition

Solaris Express Community Edition is Sun's binary release for OpenSolaris developers (code named "Nevada"). It is built from the latest OpenSolaris source and additional technology that has not been published in the OpenSolaris source base. This release is unsupported. Developers can build the OpenSolaris source by using this release as the base system. It is updated every other Friday.


Solaris Express Developer Edition

Solaris Express Developer Edition is Sun's tested release built from the OpenSolaris bits and additional technology that has not been published in the OpenSolaris source base. For additional details, including support options, see the Developer Edition site. There is no charge for this release. The Developer Edition is released every three to four months and replaces the Solaris Express monthly release.

In short, SXCE and SXDE are identical in functionality and appearance. The main difference is that SXDE has had additional testing and so is usually a few versions behind SXCE.

Because of this testing difference, SXDE is only released every few months while SXCE is released every other Friday.

The other difference with Sun's SXCE and SXDE from community distributions (such as Belenix) is that Sun includes Flash 9, RealPlayer 10, and mp3 playback support out-of-the-box since they have licenses for those technologies.

It is important to note that both of these versions are *NOT* production releases, meaning they are not intended for mission-critical deployment though some people use them that way. Even though SXDE has had more testing, it still has not had the same level of testing that a production release of Solaris does.

Look for Project Indiana to simplify things.

Edited 2007-09-25 13:35

Thanks. Clears it all up.

I'm sure Kawai can beef this up.

*OpensSolaris* is the most bleeding edge of the Solaris releases and is akin to downloading and compiling a source based Linux distro (although, confusingly enough, you can get it in binary form!)

*Solaris Express Community Edition* is akin to Debian unstable and contains the latest bleeding edge software from the OpenSolaris project.

The *Solaris Express* releases are internal Sun builds of what will later become Solaris 11.

IIRC, *Solaris Express Developer Edition* is basically *Solaris Express* with a bunch of added tools (mostly to do with Java) as well as the latest GNU tool sets and such although I'm sure there is more to it than that.

For more details, check out http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/OpenSolaris_FAQ

and
http://developers.sun.com/sxde/

Edit: Looks like Kawai got there before me.

Edited 2007-09-25 13:41 UTC

This slide from the presentation maps out the same material.
http://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=849&image=sun_idf7_13_lrg

Curiously, note that it says Sun Confidential Internal Only at the bottom.

The old installer is still there if you select the Solaris Express boot option instead of the Developer Edition boot option.

However, it will eventually go away.

CDE might look like a non-wiped ass after a ten minute diarrhea session, but by god, usability-wise, it is such a good desktop environment. Everything makes sense, everything is exactly there where you expect it to be, and there are never any surprises. It has some really cool gimmicks and features.

Seriously, use it sometimes, and look beyond the exterior. I used it extensively on my Ultra V machine (Solaris 9) and would love to see CDE with a modern appearance - but with the same excellent usability.

Edited 2007-09-25 13:37 UTC

"CDE might look like a non-wiped ass after a ten minute diarrhea session, but by god, usability-wise, it is such a good desktop environment. Everything makes sense, everything is exactly there where you expect it to be, and there are never any surprises. It has some really cool gimmicks and features."

Indeed, it is. It may look very old fashioned, but I found out that especially "computer illiterate" users who were introduced to CDE (using Sun Sparcs and Ultras running Solaris in our old psychological testing cabinet) didn't have that much problems using the desktop and the apps as their colleagues had in the "Windows" department. CDE has been in use on the HP servers running HP-UX, too - two different OSes, similar look and feel.

"Seriously, use it sometimes, and look beyond the exterior. I used it extensively on my Ultra V machine (Solaris 9) and would love to see CDE with a modern appearance - but with the same excellent usability. "

You can (nearly) get a clue about how CDE is if you install XFCE version 3 on a Linux or BSD system, and apply some of the CDE look and feel. It even may run faster because it does not use the Motif toolkit. :-)

Can someone point to some links or provide some info regarding the "high" points of CDE, and its advantages?

I used to use it on my Solaris box, but never really got past using it to simply launch numerous terminal sessions. The other tools weren't particularly compelling to me.

So, I'm just curious what I'm missing.

Here is a starting point:

http://xwinman.org/cde.php

If you used multiple commercial versions of UNIX, CDE made it easy to move from one OS to another without a great deal of pain and have a standard set of applications as part of the environment.

People used to complain about the amount of memory CDE used, but this was back in the 32-bit days when a SPARC 20 with 128 MB of RAM was considered huge. Compared to Gnome (JDS), CDE is light. I only just recently switched from CDE to JDS for my Sun Ray sessions, mostly because of improvements in the Sun Ray software and the Sun Ray 2.

Can someone point to some links or provide some info regarding the "high" points of CDE, and its advantages?

Not very many. Yes, many found it quite an easy to use thing, but that's basically because it never did very much. It was quite clear that when Windows 95 and subsequent versions of Mac OS appeared that CDE need huge investment and improvements, and nothing happened. Like a lot of stuff in the old Unix world, the whole thing got bogged down in discussions about whose standards were standards to be used and discussions that lead to nothing. Motif was also a bone of contention for developers as well as users in with its stagnant API and looks, but many Motif applications are still around.

I know of no one who used CDE and stuff like Open Look on Unix systems who wasn't desperate to use and try anything else when it came along. It just didn't move with the times and the competition.

I say this out of respect, i hope not to offend. i have noticed that the CDE Guys are in the same boat with the BeOS guys, and the MacOS 9 guys (OS/2 guys, etc). People who came to an OS, and everything "Just Worked(tm)" for what they were doing, and had what they needed. Unfortunately these OSs/GUIs also have something else in common, they are no longer developed for, or put in legacy mode.

From the GUI gallery: http://toastytech.com/guis/sol.html

As it has been mentioned before, CDE was available on the most important commercial UNIX OSes and made it easy to deal with the OS and applications without needing to know particular OS habits.

Look for Project Indiana and the "Slim Install" project to address this issue.

Both projects intend to bring the core distribution size down to a single CD.

Another reason why many of use are impatiently waiting for Project Indiana to rear it's much promising head.

If you're interested in trying out Solaris, without the huge downloads, check out some of the community distros like NexentaOS or Belenix. There is a list of them on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris#Distributions

You can order a DVD for free.
http://developers.sun.com/sxde/download.jsp

So nothing is stopping you except some spare partition somewhere.

You can order a DVD for free

Yes, you can, but if you live in the same part of EU it never arrives;)

btw. What happened to Nexenta? It's like project died. 9 months late and unresolved bugs only got bigger in last few months.

Just to qualify that a little:-

...

PRIMARY

Not at I am complaining about the way *BSD and Solaris do things, I just thought it worth mentioning, as it is something which often trips up Linux users who want to try the aforementionted.

Depends on your target audience.

If you want to target Solaris 10 (production release), use Solaris 10 Update 4.

If you're a developer just wanting experience with Solaris, and for testing, use this.

KDE is not yet available, work to get it (3.5.7 and 4.x) fully functioning on Solaris using the Sun Studio compilers is ongoing.

CDE and GNOME are installed by default.

Edited 2007-09-25 18:35

The new installer does not yet support ZFS directly, though it will very soon.

That's -- bad! What do I need a new installer for then? So it's just pure eye candy ... Oh well---

No, it isn't just eye candy.

1) It is no longer written in Java

2) It looks better

3) It is easier to use

4) The number of questions the user is asked has been greatly reduced

5) It will eventually give you more control over the install than the old installer

6) Disk partitioning is being greatly enhanced

7) ZFS support will be added soon

This is a preview release, not a final one.

It is not just "pure eye candy"...

The new installer is a "preview release" and does not yet have all the planned functionality.



That's a matter of opinion and needs. The current CLI then GUI is so that servers can be setup once a new text installer is created.



Please qualify your statement with specific examples. A wide range of hardware is already supported and it is getting better every day. OSS (Open Sound) will bring hundreds of supported sound chipsets.

The new ATi open source drivers will be integrated soon (one of the Sun devs has already built them on Solaris, but they don't yet work on the hardware they have in the labs).

Full 2D/3D acceleration is provided for Intel 915 chipsets, etc. via DRM.

Full 2D/3D acceleration is provided for nVidia graphics cards thanks to the nVidia Solaris Driver.

Support for the most common Intel Wireless Chipsests w/ automatic configuration is built in.

Support for Atheros and many other wireless chipsets is also available.

I could go on, but suffice to say that your comments would be more helpful if you gave specifics.



You do know this is a *beta* version right? This is a preview release, not a production release. There are many projects that have yet to integrate their changes. Just as nobody judges a painting until the artist is finished, no one should place judgment on an OS until it is released.