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.

One of the open-source projects that Oracle hasn't been too open about their intentions with has been OpenSolaris. Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) already closed up last month and there hasn't been too much information flowing out about the next OpenSolaris release.

An internal Oracle memo that was released last week provides a detailed summary of the company's plans for the Solaris operating system, which Oracle obtained when it acquired Sun. The memo offers a mix of good and bad news for Solaris enthusiasts.

While Sun Microsystems puts their weight behind the GNOME desktop environment for Solaris and OpenSolaris, there are developers that do work on providing a quality experience for KDE on OpenSolaris. However, getting KDE to run on a clean OpenSolaris installation can require building KDE from source and taking various other steps.

The OpenSolaris community is concerned by the silence from Oracle over its future plans for the open source operating system. In a blog posting, OpenSolaris developer Peter Tribble complained that Oracle has not mentioned OpenSolaris.

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.

At the OpenSolaris Annual Meeting, held on IRC, Oracle executive Dan Roberts has assured the community about the future of the open source version of Solaris. The statements, available as a log of the meeting, have led Peter Tribble, who had expressed concerns on the lack of communication, to conclude "rumours of its [OpenSolaris] death have been greatly exaggerated".

Bordeaux 1.6 is now running on current Solaris and OpenSolaris systems.

I have been working with a couple friends over the past two weeks to get Bordeaux running on Solaris and OpenSolaris 2008.11. We now have everything compiling and running but like always more testing needs to be done before it's ready for final release.

OpenSolaris is essentially GNU-Solaris. When talking about the user experience, one could say that since the GNOME desktop is used, running OpenSolaris is no different from running Linux.