Oracle Solaris 11.2 Now Available In Beta Form

Oracle has put out the first public beta of the forthcoming Solaris 11.2 operating system release. The big focus of Solaris 11.2 is on embracing support for cloud computing.

Oracle Solaris 11.2 ships centralized cloud management support via OpenStack integration, other cloud improvements, greater virtualization capabilities with enhancements to Solaris Zones, software-defined networking support, and many other features.

Those interested in Oracle Solaris can read some about what's new or download Solaris 11.2 beta.

Alan Coopersmith has also written about changes to the included software packages for Solaris 11.2. Solaris 11.2 finally does away with the xf86-video-nv driver in favor of loading the NVIDIA binary driver by default or falling back to VESA in unsupported configurations, GCC 4.7 and 4.8 compilers are now available alongside the older compiler packages, the Java 8 development kit and run-time are now available, Mesa 9.0.3 is available for open-source graphics drivers, and there's a whole host of other updated packages. More details on the software version/package changes can be found courtesy of Alan's blog.