Sun Microsystems announced today a new release of its OpenSolaris distribution. "Today marks the release of OpenSolaris 2009.06, the third release of the OpenSolaris Operating System. We've shifted gear, bringing you a new set of features right to your door, from the desktop to the data center." said Glynn Foster in the official release announcement. OpenSolaris 2009.06 is available for both 32 and 64 bit platforms, from a single 677 MB ISO.

Server administrators will benefit from the new "Project Crossbow" implementation, bringing network virtualization and management of resources in OpenSolaris. There is now support for setting VLAN IDs, IP observability has been greatly improved, IPMP (IP Multipathing) has been introduced and an iSCSI Port Provider for COMSTAR has been added. Also, interoperability with Windows has been enhanced through the OpenSolaris CIFS service with features like host-based access control, access control lists for shares, offline files client-side caching and better synchronization. Moreover, cluster capabilities have been added by featuring the Open HA Clusters solution, and the socket implementation has been improved.

New features for users in OpenSolaris 2009.06:

· Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 web browser;
· Easy-to-backup system through "Time Slider Snapshot Management";
· Multimedia codecs through Codeina Web Shop;
· Elisa Media Center;
· Time tracker tool;
· Image Packaging System has been improved;
· The Package Manager has also been tweaked and has a better start-up performance
· Out of the box video card drivers for ATI, Nvidia, Intel and Sun.

On the hardware side, OpenSolaris can now run on SPARC platforms and offers full support for the new Intel Xeon 5500 CPU. OpenSolaris 2009.06 will have no problems running on laptops and will even come pre-installed on the Tecra M10 and Portege R600 ones.

For developers, the OpenSolaris team has introduced MySQL 5.1, PHP 5.2.9 and also a selection of DTrace probes. The JavaFX SDK development platform and Java Runtime Environment 1.6.13 have been added. The Git Version Control System is now available in the repositories.

Download OpenSolaris 2009.06 right now from Softpedia.