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Ars.technica tested Opensolaris 2008.05 in "First look: OpenSolaris 2008.05 a work in progress":

Although the OpenSolaris development community still has a lot of work to do before the operating system is ready to take on Linux on the desktop, the progress so far indicates that the project deserves further attention. We will keep an eye on future releases to see how the platform evolve.

Containers in Opensolaris 2008.05 work a little bit different like the ones in the other versions of Solaris. They are an own brand at the moment. Dan Price reports in his article A field guide to Zones in OpenSolaris 2008.05 about the differences.

There is a new website out there opensolaris.org and with this website the final release of Opensolaris 2008.05 is available. Download and try it. Additionally you will find the the torrents at the Sun Website as well.

One of the limitations of Opensolaris 2008.05 will be the missing LiveUpgrade. But ... well ... you have something better. The whole concept of LifeUpgrade was transformed into the future by using the capabilities of ZFS.

Today, i upgraded my workstations at home to Opensolaris 2008.05 as the primary operating system. Went smoothly. When you don´t have to keep the Nvidia drivers out of your code because of political reasons, even installing and configuring the graphic card is a no-brainer. You have to do nothing. Correct settings out of the box.

You can download a test image of Opensolaris 2008.05 Release Candidate 2 (the distro formerly and still better known as Indiana). It starts to look really good.



Just to give you a short impression of OpenSolaris 2008.05 i´ve prepared a short walktrough to the installation of the distribution, albeit it´s so simple you won´t need one.The URL of the torrent is available in this announcement mail in the indiana-discuss forum. Please read this announcment completly. But now to the walkthrough....

Another important Solaris release isn´t that far in the future: Sun plans to release the first version of the Opensolaris distribution named Opensolaris 2008.05 in May. Jyothi Srinath linked in her blog to a preliminary version of the "Getting Started" documentation. It´s a first public version, so feel free to help by sending suggestions to indiana-discuss@sun.com.