Sun Microsystems has released the OpenSolaris programme for CommunityOne West. The event, which aims to bring together students, developers and decision-makers to talk about open source issues, will take place in San Francisco from the 1st to the 3rd of June. Begining with the presentation of the latest version 2009.06 of OpenSolaris, the event will have over 70 sessions.

Sun Microsystems on Monday will launch a supported version of OpenSolaris at the CommunityOne conference in San Francisco. After working on OpenSolaris for three years, Sun now has a supported distribution, called 2008.5, available.

The OpenSolaris project, which has been slowly gaining momentum over the past year, issued its first official release last week. Designed with an emphasis on usability and easy installation, OpenSolaris aims to provide a complete desktop platform for users and developers built on top of Sun's Solaris kernel.

OpenSolaris 2008.5, the new distribution based on the OpenSolaris operating system, has been released into the wild. This release follows the conventions set by many of the popular Linux distributions, such as being based on a single live CD with installer, but also adds a load of OpenSolaris-specific features such as ZFS, DTrace, Containers, and a new package management system, IPS.

I decided to finally check out OpenSolaris 2008.11. While this release came out back in November of 2008 (hence the 2008.11 naming convention), it has taken me this long to finally give it a chance. Maybe it is because I am still somewhat skeptical with the whole OpenSolaris Project.

OpenSolaris came out with its third release last week and within a year there seems to have been some pretty good progress. The biggest question hanging over OpenSolaris is whether Oracle will decide to continue the project.

Since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems last year, the future of the Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems have been called into question especially as the OpenSolaris 2010.1H release was missing and has been that way for months now with no official communication from Oracle. A new OpenSolaris release hasn't come in more than a year and we still are left wondering if or when it will arrive.

At work they were asking us to get familiar with openSolaris for a potential future project. I’d played with it a few years ago, so I decided to check out the latest version I had. On of my LXF discs had openSolaris 2008.11 and I figured that while I was checking it out I’d review it as well.

Ever since I started working with OpenSolaris (release 2008.05 to build 118: 2010.02), I have been suffering through some of the longer load times. While the distribution is maturing fairly well and quick, the boot times are just horrible. And to my understanding the culprit is ZFS. OpenSolaris utilizes ZFS as its default file system.