Sun has reached an agreement with Toshiba to pre-install the OpenSolaris operating system on Toshiba laptops.
The laptops will be available in the US from early 2009 and will come with the latest version of OpenSolaris: 2008.11. "Toshiba and Sun are announcing that we're going to pre-configure and optimise OpenSolaris for certain Toshiba models," said Jim McHugh, Sun's vice president of datacentre software, in a promotional video.
The firms have yet to release details on availability, pricing or which laptop models would feature the operating system.
OpenSolaris is Sun's flagship operating system, designed for desktop, server and high-performance computing environments. Features in OpenSolaris 2008.11 include Time Slider, a graphical interface slide bar that allows users to access previous versions of files.
"Time Slider lets us integrate ZFS [file system] snapshots taken automatically by the system with a standard window environment file browser," said Stephen Hahn, OpenSolaris project lead. "It lets you access previous versions of your source code, of your word-processing document or any other thing that you're saving on your system." Developers will have greater access to repositories, said Sun, and will be able to deliver code to OpenSolaris users through the updated package manager.
Sun also extended its OpenSolaris subscription options. There will be two subscription plans: 'production' and 'essentials'.
OpenSolaris and Solaris are excellent operationg systems, but for now OpenSolaris have a little too much beta quality feel to it for this too succeed.
The time slider is avesome, but that is not enough e.g. they need to make it easier to set up and change network settings, Both wireless and wired ones.
All this will probably be fixed by 2009.11 if they continue to improve at their current rate, so why ruin their reputation by releasing it prematurely.
Solaris and OpenSolaris have great potensials even on the desktop.