You’d almost forget, but aside from the enterprise-focused variant of Solaris for which Oracle sells support contracts, the company has also nominally maintained and released a version of Solaris aimed at non-production use and enthusiasts. This version, called Solaris CBE or Common Build Environment, has always been free to download and use, but since it was last updated all the way back in early 2022, you’d be forgiven for having forgotten all about it. Today, though, Oracle has finally released a new version of Solaris CBE, after three years of silence.
The Common Build Environment (CBE) release for Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 81 is now available via “pkg update” from the release repository or by downloading the install images from the Oracle Solaris Downloads page. As with the first Oracle Solaris 11.4 CBE, this is licensed for free/open source developers and non-production personal use, and this is not the final, supported version of the 11.4.81 SRU, but the pre-release version on which the SRU was built. It contains all of the new features and interfaces, but not all of the final rounds of bug fixes, from the 11.4.81 SRU.
The previous version was the CBE for 11.4.42, so there’s more than 3 years worth of changes between these two releases. If you wanted to read about the changes in every intervening SRU, you can find the monthly SRU release announcements for every SRU, and the What’s New summaries for each quarterly feature release starting with SRU 63, on the Oracle Solaris blog. Some FOSS version updates are also listed in Oracle Solaris 11.4 Bundled Software Updates. You can also find posts about some of the new features from the SRUs on Joerg Moellenkamp’s blog and Marcel Hofstetter’s blog.
↫ Alan Coopersmith and Jan Pechanec
With three years of changes, updates, and fixes to talk about, it’s no surprise there’s a lot of things this new release covers, and credit to Oracle: the blog post announcing this new release is incredibly detailed, lists a ton of the changes in great detail, and is definitely required reading if you’re interested in trying this release out for yourself. I’m definitely tempted, even if it’s Oracle.
Solaris 11.4 SRU 81 CBE comes with much more recent versions of the free and open source tools and frameworks you’ve come to expect, like updated versions of GCC, LLVM/clang, tons of programming languages like Python, Perl, and Rust, as well as updates to all the related toolchain components. The CTF (Compact C Type Format) utilities (ctfconvert, ctfdump, and ctfmerge), used to build Solaris itself and crucial for tools like DTrace, have also been updated, and now reside in /usr/bin. These updates are joined by a massive number of other, related low-level changes.
For desktop users, GNOME has been updated from the veritably ancient GNOME 3.38 to GNOME 45 (current is 48.1), which is a big jump for Solaris desktop users. Firefox and Thunderbird jump from 91 ESR to 128 ESR, which should deliver a much-improved browsing and email experience. All of this graphical desktop use is powered by version 21.1 of the X server, Mesa 21.3.8, and version 470.182 of the NVIDIA driver. Grub has been updated to version 2.12, and thanks to a new secure boot shim, users no longer have to make any changes to secure boot settings, as Solaris will always default to installing the secure boot image.
This is just a small selection of all the changes, and it seems Oracle is planning on releasing these CBE versions more often from here on out, as they say this release contains a ton of preparatory work for changes in upcoming releases, “which should come more often than once every three years going forward”. Do note that while Solaris CBE releases are free for non-production use, they’re not open source.
I’d love to give it a spin but downloading the installer image requires creating an Oracle account, and maybe I’m just being silly here but I just don’t want Oracle to have any of my information they don’t already have from my IP address and user agent string.
I suppose I could grab the 11.4 release install image from archive.org and then update it to the current release, but I have a feeling I would have to create an Oracle account just to update the OS, something even Microsoft and Apple don’t force you to do (though both really push you to create an account with their respective services).
I guess I won’t know until I try, so try I will.
Morgan,
The first login on bugmenot works.
https://bugmenot.com/
Or when that doesn’t work lookup “temporary email”, there are tons of services that let you use one off email addresses and they continually cycle in new domains. They work great for things just like this when you don’t want to use your real info. It doesn’t matter if the service is secure or not since you’ll never use the email address again for anything you care about, which is the point of the service.
I completely forgot about bugmenot, thanks! I did download the 11.4 installer image from archive.org and tried to boot it on my mini PC used for OS testing, but it halted at detecting USB devices and the keyboard stopped working. I tried booting it in Oracle’s own VirtualBox and ironically it won’t boot there either, complaining about SVM not being enabled even though it is enabled in BIOS, and other OSes boot in VirtualBox without issues.
I took the next couple of days off work for my birthday so I might drag out a couple of older HP systems and give them a spin with it. I’m too tired to fool with it anymore tonight.
Morgan,
I’m too busy right now to try it. I would have thought virtualbox could do it. I used Solaris years ago but TBH after all these years on linux I’m not sure they have anything I want/need.
Solaris 11.4 runs just fine in VirtualBox. We do so internally a lot as part of our pre-release testing and many Solaris developers use instances inside VirtualBox daily.
@Darren Moffat:
It could be my hardware that’s an issue for Solaris on VirtualBox, it’s an all AMD system, though as stated I haven’t had issues with any other OSes.
As previously mentioned I’m going to try on a HP EliteDesk later which is all Intel. I might have better luck with more generic hardware, and if it installs I may also try Solaris on VirtualBox on Solaris just for fun.
I can confirm that the bugmenot credentials work not only to sign-in on the web but for the wget download script as well. I would post it here but it is massive.
Happy Birthday!
Thank you!
@Morgan I’ve had similar issues trying recent Solaris versions so you’re not alone, but I’m not AMD I’m Intel. The hardware I tried was older yet boots most Linux distros no problem.
Like @Alfman I have a lot of nostaglia regarding Solaris, but I also have no real or very little need for it.
I think they dropped the ball a few years back, they could have been a viable alternative, but the BSDs now sit firmly in that category.
Yeah neither of my Intel HP workstations (i5-7500 and i5-9500 based) would boot it properly. Both of those systems are excellent with OpenBSD and FreeBSD, and both of those operating systems are more than good enough for my needs. It’s interesting how much further ahead open source OSes are than their commercial peers.
It would have been a fun moment to play with the latest Solaris, sure, but I’m not really missing out on anything but idle fun.
If you have an existing 11.4.42 system (the previous CBE) no account is needed just run pkg update
Unfortunately it has turned out to be a “chicken-and-egg” situation; I can’t get either the last 11.4 release or the current CBE release to boot on any of my hardware. Thanks though for the confirmation that no account is needed to update! That’s a great thing.
It is just nostalgia but Solaris will always be “real” UNIX to me. I got my start downloading Linux floppy disk images on the Sun workstations at university in the middle of the night. Now I am downloading Solaris on Linux over fibre at home (still the middle of the night though).
It surprises me how reasonably up-to-date all the software mentioned in the release notes is. GCC 14, Clang 19, and even Firefox and Thunderbird 128 are the same versions as are going to be in the next version of Debian Stable (not yet released). The only packages still laughably old are Java and MySQL (both Oracle products).
LeFantome,
I switched to the mariadb fork ages ago, I think most of us did. Ironically I suspect more people would want the fork.
I used to be a regular java user, but after the oracle takeover they broke too much and I had to abandon java applications that were critical to me in the data center at the time. I swore to avoid java under oracle’s stewardship going forward, which I did. Now I have zero interest in java. Solaris was a good unix, I think it’s better than linux in some ways, but having oracle’s name attached tarnishes it.
This is totally O/T but you mention fiber at home, I wish we had that. When Verizon FIOS came to long island, the neighborhoods they served ended up getting better service at cheaper prices. Meanwhile neighborhoods with no FIOS competition were left paying much more for much less. Our optimum service suffers from regular micro-outages and there are no network upgrades on the horizon. If there were competition we’d simply switch, but we have no choice.
Solaris could be an alternative OS. It is a seriously well built server OS. It could probably use a bunch of modern device drivers.
Is it safe to go near this if you can’t afford having a lawyer on retainer? It’s from Oracle after all.
… “which should come more often than once every three years going forward” …
Coming from Oracle, this translates to “sayonara”.
I mean, they said “sayonara” a while back. When they pretty much laid off most of the Solaris team ages ago.
Even the OSS forks of Solaris are ghost towns now.
Instead of giving Oracle your eyeballs, just install OpenIndiana instead. Open Source Solaris, not Oracle’s rubbish.
https://www.openindiana.org
I was surprised to see that ‘ldd /usr/bin/ls’ showed that ls and other utilities were linked to libuutil.so.1.
For a moment, I wondered if Solaris had migrated to Uutils even before Ubuntu did. Other binaries, like Python, do not link to this library.
Apparently though, it is just something to do with ZFS. They had me going there for a minute.