Sun Microsystems has announced its first supported version of the open-source OpenSolaris operating system. The project was created in 2005 by Sun aiming to build a developer community around its Solaris Operating System technology. The 2008.5 distribution has been made available and an official price list for support will become available on May 13.

The OpenSolaris distribution builds upon the strength of the Unix System V Release 4 codebase, with significant improvements by Sun. As such is the only open source System V-based operating system available. Solaris is also based on the same codebase.

For more information on how to get started with OpenSolaris 2008.5, Click Here.

Release features AMD 64-bit as well as 32-bit processor support

iXsystems announced today the release of PC-BSD Edison Edition. PC-BSD is a fully functional open source desktop operating system based on FreeBSD 6.3-STABLE. FreeBSD is one of the most used UNIX-like operating systems in the world and is widely renowned as the most stable and secure server operating system. PC-BSD has a Push-Button Installer (PBI) wizard developed exclusively for PC-BSD that lets users download and install a wide range of available applications in a self-extracting and self-installing format.

Read The Press Release.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE. This release continues the development of the 6-STABLE branch providing performance and stability improvements, many bug fixes and new features. Some of the highlights:

• KDE updated to 3.5.8, GNOME updated to 2.20.1, Xorg updated to 7.3
• BIND updated to 9.3.4
• sendmail updated to 8.14.2
• lagg(4) driver ported from OpenBSD/NetBSD
• unionfs file system re-implemented
• freebsd-update(8) now supports an upgrade command

Read the full announcement here.

January 11, 2008,

The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.

The KDE 4 Libraries have seen major improvements in almost all areas. The Phonon multimedia framework provides platform independent multimedia support to all KDE applications, the Solid hardware integration framework makes interacting with (removable) devices easier and provides tools for better power management.

The KDE 4 Desktop has gained some major new capabilities. The Plasma desktop shell offers a new desktop interface, including panel, menu and widgets on the desktop as well as a dashboard function. KWin, the KDE Window manager, now supports advanced graphical effects to ease interaction with your windows.

Lots of KDE Applications have seen improvements as well. Visual updates through vector-based artwork, changes in the underlying libraries, user interface enhancements, new features, even new applications — you name it, KDE 4.0 has it. Okular, the new document viewer and Dolphin, the new file manager are only two applications that leverage KDE 4.0’s new technologies.

The Oxygen Artwork team provides a breath of fresh air on the desktop. Nearly all the user-visible parts of the KDE desktop and applications have been given a facelift. Beauty and consistency are two of the basic concepts behind Oxygen.

Read the full announcement here.

From DesktopBSD.net:

It is my great pleasure to announce the availability of DesktopBSD 1.6 final. This release is the first stable release of the 1.6 branch and comes with a great number of new features and improvements. It is based on the second release candidate of FreeBSD’s upcoming production release 6.3 and provides the user with an enhanced KDE 3.5.8 desktop environment.

The most notable new features are:

• FreeBSD 6 as a modern and reliable base system
• X.Org release 7.3, improving support for modern graphics hardware
• Live CD/DVD feature for testing the system without installation to a hard-drive
• Revised installer supporting upgrades from 1.0 and previous 1.6 release candidates
• Improved package manager usability and performance
• Many enhancements and bugfixes for the DesktopBSD tools
• Support for multiple processors and multi-core CPUs
• Inclusion of the NVIDIA graphics driver for hardware 3D rendering
• DesktopBSD build servers as an up-to-date source for precompiled packages

Please read the release notes for more information.

ISO images for the 32-bit DVD (i386), 64-bit CD (amd64) and 32-bit CD (i386-CD) are available. An add-on CD with language packages for the 32-bit CD is also provided (not required with the DVD). The files can be obtained from our download page.