Today my free Solaris Express DVD arrived. The first time I placed my order was six or seven months ago. I think Sun's website said that they were overwhelmed with orders and had to have a new batch of DVDs created. Months later I read about people receiving their DVDs, but mine never came. A few weeks ago I received an email from Sun informing me about their latest batch of Solaris Express Developer Edition DVDs -- a preview of Solaris 11 based on OpenSolaris. I decided to place an order in case my previous order has been deleted. A few weeks later, here it is!

The plan was to install it on my HP DV8000 laptop. Unfortunately once it gets past the Grub boot loader, my keyboard becomes completely useless. I look forward to better driver support in the future. Sadly I can only use Solaris on two of my five computers. Don't worry -- I'll survive :)

I booted the DVD in one of my servers to see if the new installer is being used yet. It is not. I read somewhere that the current installer has not been updated since Solaris 2. The new installer is going to make a huge difference in people's first impressions. I was very impressed with screenshots and an interactive demo. They have put a lot of effort into studying the installation software of many operating systems to determine which features are most successful and intuitive. I would say that the new installer most resembles Ubuntu's installer. You boot from the DVD and get a working Gnome desktop with applications. You can run the installer program which takes you through a wizard. The new package groupings make much more sense. I think if you want to do custom partitioning, your end up using command line tools at this time. They are currently working on improving that part of the installer.

According to this thread, a community member has made the Zimbra messaging and collaboration suite work on native Solaris. He is waiting for the latest release of Zimbra (supposedly soon) before releasing his Solaris installer. I have decided to go with Zimbra instead of Scalix because Scalix does not run on Solaris, and will not install in a Linux branded zone. Zimbra on Solaris is really good news for the Solaris community.

In the fall of 2007 I plan on buying a Sun Ultra 20 M2 workstation with dual 20" LCD screens and Solaris Express Developer Edition for work. I'm going to pay for it because I can't justify the switch from my current workstation and Windows to a UNIX workstation -- I just want to. Since I do all development in Java now, I can move to UNIX. The only two issues I foresee are MS Office 2007 support in OpenOffice/Star Office, and a JNI/C DLL I use. The JNI/C DLL is a proprietary encryption library required for communication with one of our other products. This DLL is only required in one of my Java projects and since it was designed to be distributed, the part that uses the C DLL can be run on a Windows computer. Regarding OpenOffice, I read somewhere that OpenOffice 2.2 has the ability to transform MS Word 2007 documents to ODF and back. I'll have to see how well that works. The other issue with OpenOffice is fonts. Installing the mscorefonts package on your linux distribution solves most font related problems. Star Office (which comes on Solaris) comes with many more standard Windows fonts, and a better dictionary. Hopefully the transition will be simple. I'll always keep my old workstation around in case I need Windows for something.

And lastly, I found out that Compiz runs on Solaris and has been tested with a Sun Ultra 20 M2 workstation. Very cool :) I'll have to make sure to get the NVida 3D card with it so that I can use Compiz. I think it's great that all software that I want to use is available on Solaris. I'll be using: Gnome, Evince, Gftp, Firefox 2, Thunderbird 2, Flash Player 9, Star Office 8, Java 6, NetBeans 6, Sun App Server 9.1/Glassfish 2, Postgres, Gaim, Terminal Server Client/rdesktop, and probably more.