Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, an open source icon and developer of one of the world's fastest growing open source databases for approximately $1 billion in total consideration. The acquisition accelerates Sun's position in enterprise IT to now include the $15 billion database market. Today's announcement reaffirms Sun's position as the leading provider of platforms for the Web economy and its role as the largest commercial open source contributor.

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Sun Microsystems has gone to great lengths in recent years to make its Solaris operating system more open by going open source. But "open" doesn't always mean "easy."

That changes today, with the Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE) 9/07 release (also known as version 3.0), which is highlighted by new features to make the software easier to actually get up and running.

"We've been getting feedback for years that it's [Solaris] just too difficult to install," Jeff McMeekin, product line manager for SXDE at Sun, told InternetNews.com. "It's not as positive a first experience as you'd like to have and we wanted to address that and focus on making a really good first impression."

Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE) first debuted in February of this year and is intended to be a more stable, developer-focused version of OpenSolaris. SXDE 3.0 is based on OpenSolaris build number 70 with additional stability and testing time baked in.

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Sun Microsystems today announced an update to its Solaris operating system designed to improve performance under virtualization and add support for Linux applications, along with other improvements to the software.

The most notable change Sun made to Solaris 10 8/07, the official title of the update, is the addition of Solaris Containers for Linux Applications. With this update, native x86 Linux applications can now run on Solaris for x86 systems unmodified.

Sun guarantees that applications written and tested for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and CentOS, the Community ENTerprise Operating System which is based on RHEL, will run in its container software, according to Dan Roberts, director of Solaris, OpenSolaris and database marketing.

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ITpapers.com has a huge list of free whitepapers on so many topics you could read for months. Here is the link to the Solaris papers for anyone who cares.


Solaris IT Papers