Although I'm not working actively on OpenSolaris any more, I was happy to see the launch today of OpenSolaris 2009.06. See Glenn's announcement email here.

The download of the LiveCD distro went down without a hitch, and was surprisingly fast for the day of launch. Kudos to whomever set up the web infrastructure for day-of-launch. (I think Intel could learn something from you guys...)

I loaded it up in a VirtualBox v2.2 guest (on my Intel Corei7 desktop no less) and it fired up beautifully. Some things I noticed right away:

• The visual presentation continues to be polished. I liked the graphical boot which hides all of the (granted very cool) initial startup of ZFS and one-time processing of the SMF manifests. These are details that only a geek like me could love, but frankly make the older text-based startup look more messy. Text startup is still available if you need to debug something. The default desktop wallpaper is cool as well.
  


• I was amazed that full Compiz desktop optimization was working flawlessly in VirtualBox guest. I'm not sure if this is a testament to the VIrtualBox guys or the OpenSolaris guys, but the 3D support seems better than with some of the other client OS's I have been loading up lately.
  


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  Finally, I have been watching things progress, and I know that there are some incredibly cool technology innovations in this OS, particularly with a native Nehalem system. For example, I saw a PowerTop screen cap that showed time in Turbo Mode, all of the deep C states and some more interesting wakeups to pick through. There is the new Power Aware Dispatcher too, which migrates threads to minimize power usage. This could move OpenSolaris into the lead in terms of power management, particularly when the tickless scheduler is done.
  

Nice job overall, guys. I know there are a lot of great Intel and Sun and community improvements. Keep it up! See the web site for a download.