Sun updates Solaris Express

by Stephen Shankland June 21, 2005 5:04 PM PDT Follow @stshank

Sun Microsystems has released a new version of Solaris Express, its version of the now open-source operating system for those who want to test prototypes of new features.

Solaris Express 6/05, also known as Nevada Build 15, brings the new boot software, according to the blog of Sun's Dan Price Tuesday. The new start-up process uses GRUB, the Grand Unified Bootloader and makes several other significant changes.

The new Solaris version also includes support for Nemo, a reworked standard for the driver software that controls networking devices. Nemo is faster and lets multiple network cards be linked into what amounts to a single faster card, Sun said, and several network card drivers have been updated for the Nemo framework.

The new version also includes updates to the DTrace optimization and debugging tool, Nvidia graphics and networking chip support, the Intel gigabit Ethernet network driver, and the Samba file server software.