>Is OpenSolaris akin to Debian Stable >And would Solaris Express CE be akin to Debian Lenny? or Sid?
I think a better way to explain it would be to compare it to Red Hat. Solaris 10 is like the most stable, rock-solid, battle-tested and debugged version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Old versions like Solaris 8, Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 are known for their stability and are often used in mission critical applications like in the finance / banking industry and in government / military apps. SXCE (Solaris Express Community Edition) is like the newer unstable branch of brand new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3; it's got new features, but we're still working on getting the kinks out. SXDE is like SXCE but I guess it's aimed for programmers and developers. OpenSolaris 2008.05 (Indiana) and 2008.11 is like the unstable branch of Fedora. It's like a testing bed for insane, crazy new ideas that Ian Murdock and all the Sun engineers get after drinking too many jolt colas and other assorted energy drinks, and if some of these crazy revolutionary ideas work and prove to be stable after some very intense testing and debugging, they'll eventually find their way back into the main Solaris entperprise builds (soon to be Solaris 11 in a couple of years). For an example of what one of these insane / creative ideas looks like, timeslider is a new feature that's slowly fighting it's way through the bugs and eventually making its way into 2008.11 (see link below): http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/entry/zfs_on_the_desktop_zfs You're not going to find a GNOME desktop feature for lightweight ZFS snapshots that take up almost no hard drive space and allow you to rewind all your folders 30 days back in time anywhere else ;-) As a result of all the insanity and caffeine inspired creativity, I think Indiana 2008.05 is really frickin' cool and it's what I actually use on my desktop at work (I run it on bare metal, no virtual machines). However, ONE VERY IMPORTANT WARNING: BE CAREFUL WITH THE: pkg image-update COMMAND!!!!!! The pkg image-update is a dangerous roller-coaster that will hurl your fragile UNIX desktop at warp speed through space and time right up to the latest and most unstable build of OpenSolaris Indiana (whatever that may be) and you might not like it (in my experience, I never liked it, which is why I still use build 86 for my every day desktop work). However, ZFS makes it easy to hit the undo button and use the beadm command to rollback to the old build (maybe build 86) instead of being stuck with the newest unstable build (build 101 or whatever it is now). -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
