OpenSolaris 2008.11 is ready

The OpenSolaris project developers have released the final version 2008.11, four weeks after the release candidate and in line with their six-monthly release cycle. Apart from Firefox 3, Gnome 2.24 and OpenOffice 3, which are mainly intended for desktop use, the operating system also offers a complete web stack, including an Apache web server and a 64-bit version of the MySQL database. For handling data backups within the default ZFS file system, the developers integrated a service for generating automatic snapshots as well as the graphical ZFS Time Slider tool. With this tool users can conveniently navigate through the various archived file versions.

The official page containing the system requirements is rather spartan: 512 MBytes of RAM and 2.6 GB of hard disk space is a minumum and 8 GB of disk is recommended. The page detailing the limitations is slightly longer and it explains that version 2008.11 currently only runs on 32 and 64-bit x86 systems. It is not possible to upgrade from a previous version, and the data on a Solaris partition used for installation can't be retained. With suitable partitions in place, OpenSolaris can be installed in a multi-boot system next to Linux, Mac OS X or Windows.

(djwm)