14 DAY TRIAL // The second developer preview of OpenSolaris Live CD (codename Indiana) was released last night, after it was first announced at the beginning of the year. Initially scheduled for end of January 2008, Indiana Live CD Preview 2 comes packed with some new and emerging OpenSolaris technologies, such as:
￭ Based on Nevada build 79b; ￭ pkg(1) improvements, including progress reporting, verification support and incremental catalog update; ￭ ksh93 is the default *system* shell (bash remains the default user shell); ￭ Introduction of /usr/has/bin (be aware, though, that it is experimental), with /usr/bin/vi now linking to vim by default; ￭ Addition of several new packages on http://pkg.opensolaris.org, including version 2.3.1 of the popular open source Office suite, OpenOffice.org; ￭ Java Runtime Environment (JRE) was included by default on the Live CD; ￭ The following set of drivers have been included in this second preview:
￭ NVIDIA Graphics System Software (nvidia) ￭ ADMtek Ethernet Driver (afe) ￭ AMD8111 Fast Ethernet Driver (amd8111s) ￭ Davicom 9102 Fast Ethernet Driver (dmfe) ￭ Macronix Fast Ethernet Driver (mxfe) ￭ Nvidia ck804 pro / mcp55 pro combo SATA driver (nvsata) ￭ Sun NIU leaf driver (nxge) ￭ Ralink RT2500 802.11b/g Wireless Driver (ralink) ￭ realtek 8180L 802.11b driver (rtw) ￭ USB Keyspan serial driver (usbsksp)
￭ ...and many bug fixes!
Indiana is a Live CD distribution, based on the OpenSolaris source code, which tries to make the installation experience easier, to modernize the look and feel of OpenSolaris on the desktop, and to introduce a network-based package management system into Solaris. It will also have the capability for developers to create their own customized distribution. The following are some of the most important features of the Indiana project:
￭ Single CD download, with LiveCD 'try before you install' capabilities ￭ Caiman installer, with significantly improved installation experience ￭ ZFS as the default filesystem ￭ Image packaging system, with capabilities to pull packages from network repositories ￭ GNU utilities in the default $PATH ￭ bash as the default shell ￭ GNOME 2.20 desktop environment
The first official release will be available in Spring 2008. Until then, we've created a tutorial with detailed installation instructions.
Remember that this is an alpha release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only. Please report bugs to the OpenSolaris Indiana Bug Tracker
Download OpenSolaris Indiana Preview 2 right now from Softpedia.