Solaris 10 was a really big release for the Sun operating system, and it just got better. There is a new update of the Solaris installation: 1/06, with a long list of improvements and new features. I am downloading it now, as some laptop improvements are on there as well, and it’s supposed to look nicer when it boots now. 🙂
Solaris 10 has a bunch of really interesting and innovative features, and seems like a very serious enterprise OS. At the Javapolis I attended a Solaris BOF. Adam Leventhal showed his haxx0r skills with a terminal window and some much appreciated cheesy programmer humor, as well as some really cool demos on DTrace and on BrandZ. DTrace is the tracing facility for Solaris 10, and allows in-production tracing and profiling on 30.000+ different probes, without restarting anything. It is a really powerful and efficient tool to track down those nasty complicated performance problems that only seem to happen in production. BrandZ is a project where you can run another OS (e.g. Linux) inside a Solaris Container (Container is a bit like VMWare but without the performance overhead). And since you can DTrace Containers, that means you can DTrace Linux applications this way, too. Really cool stuff, I hope they are going to add a Windows BrandZ container, too, but I haven’t seen on the roadmap yet. 😉
Solaris 10 is free and open source, so you can download the installation DVD for free on the Sun web site, or Google for some open source Solaris distros. Some smart people even made Eclipse work again on Solaris, after IBM pulled support of Solaris x86 because it was becoming a threat.