It’s been at least a month since I last installed Solaris and after receiving several e-mails with details on the next OpenSolaris build (every other week) I just couldn’t resist the urge to take it for a test drive.

The installation has not changed much (I just missed build 70 - it’s downloading as I type) and this time around I found myself running the text based install from within the GUI, not a bad thing as I prefer the text install and always forget to select that option at boot.
An hour or so later and I now have a Solaris box to play with, handy as I am looking at using Java for one of my projects, and as I have mentioned before, Java runs best on Solaris!.

Not one to stand still for longer than a minute, I began focusing my attentions on JavaEE 5. Once again I found myself choosing between GlassFish and Apache Geronimo, not an easy task. I was very impressed with Geronimo the last time I fired it up, but I have been hearing a lot of good things about GlassFish recently and the v2 release can not be far off.

GlassFish felt much quicker this time around and the admin interface is looking very “Enterprise Like”, very nice!. A quick deploy of Lucene and everything worked as expected, now for the hard part, design…

As for preempting change, well who could have missed the IBM/Solaris announcement last week. Solaris is finally getting the recognition it deserves and with IBM on board and Dell not far behind, we may now start to see the Small/Medium Business taking advantage of the Enterprise capabilities and World-Record performance.

With this information to hand I spent the weekend upgrading my Solaris Administrator Cert to include Sun Certified Network Administrator for Solaris 10. You need a good understanding of the IP stack to take this test, and in doing so you learn a lot about the differences between Solaris and other Unix variants.

If your still not convinced, try it for yourself, download your copy of Solaris 10 here, it’s free!.