A Tour Of Sun's Project Indiana Preview 2

The first preview release was based upon Nevada Build 75 and this second preview is based upon Build 79. Build 81 is currently the latest and greatest from the OpenSolaris camp.

So what do we think of OpenSolaris Developer Preview 1/08? Well, it looks like a basic GNOME desktop found in many Linux distributions, but Sun engineers (and the OpenSolaris community) have done a great job at making Solaris a more viable operating system for the desktop but frankly they still have a ways to go in accomplishing their goals and until then we cannot see its mainstream adoption. Project Indiana still lacks a charisma or really anything to make it very exciting to a simple desktop user. Sure, D-Trace, ZFS, and the other Solaris technologies are great for a technologist, but a normal desktop user just won't care -- Project Indiana has yet to even include a word processor. We are looking forward to the OpenSolaris release in March, but we don't expect any major changes until the OpenSolaris "Jericho" release that is coming six months later.