Solaris Express Developer Edition is a free, quarterly release of Sun's next generation Solaris Operating System built from the source code repository at OpenSolaris.org. The release includes the latest tools, technologies, and platforms to create applications for the Solaris OS, Java Application Platforms, and Web 2.0. "Major highlights: new Solaris installer - the first major rewrite of the Solaris installer since Solaris 8 makes installation much easier; D-Light, the GUI tool to bring the power of DTrace to a broad developer audience; service offerings have been augmented with the addition of installation and configuration support." Update: Review here.
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Member since:2005-07-06
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
Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2006-12-28
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
Member since:2005-07-18
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.
Member since:
2005-06-29
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.