Farewell To Solaris Express Community Edition
Some of the key applications shipping with Solaris Express Community Edition were Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, StarOffice, and the standard GNOME applications. Helping to add to the 10+ GB install size are a horde of other applications installed by default like the Bluefish Editor, GHex. PgAdmin III, Dia Diagram Editor, Gobby Collaborative Text Editor, Zenmap, Drivel, OpenProj, GKrellM, GNOME Commander, Wireshark, GIMP, Solaris SmartCard Console, and many others.
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Solaris Express Community Edition never received support for IPS (the Image Packaging System) that was rolled out with OpenSolaris and is expected to be used by Solaris 11. Independently available, there is the Blastwave project that was available for providing some level of sane package management for SXCE. With the lack of a nice package management system is part of the reason why there are so many programs installed by default. For example, with Build 130 the "Sound & Video" applications included Brasero, Sound Juicer, Cheese, Codeina, Jokosher Audio Editor, Moovida Media Center, RealPlayer 11, Rhythmbox, Songbird Media Player, Sound Recorder, and Totem Movie Player. There is multiple media players installed on an operating system that is not even designed for multimedia playback. SXCE shipped by default with a few proprietary software components like RealPlayer, the Adobe Flash Player plug-in, and the NVIDIA Solaris graphics driver.
For those that may want Solaris Express Community Edition for historical purposes or just want to give it a try, head on over to this Sun area (registration required) before all traces of it disappear at the end of this month. This is not actually the first SunOS casualty to OpenSolaris but back in 2008 the Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE) operating system halted after it was producing bi-annual Solaris snapshots that were bundled with various development tools, but it was a bit nicer and even integrated the Caiman installer in 2007. Going forward OpenSolaris is the future for Sun Microsystems / Oracle and the next OpenSolaris release will be available within a month or two. For those out of the loop, below are a few screenshots we took from the latest OpenSolaris 2010.03 development snapshot (Build 131) to illustrate some of the differences.
Even OpenSolaris hasn't been churning along elegantly but Sun Microsystems has slipped from delivering their consistent six-month release cycles, the company remains private about some of their roadmaps and feature plans, etc. Solaris 11 may also be out this year to replace Solaris 10 that has been around for a half-decade. OpenSolaris preview builds continue to be offered at Genunix.org or you can update to the latest packages using IPS on an existing OpenSolaris 2009.06 installation.
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