From dorm room to boardroom. OpenSolaris has everything you need to take your brilliant idea, build a prototype, test it, deploy it, and run it on production servers -- out of a loft, or across your enterprise. And when your application goes viral, you won't have to throw hardware at the problem, or switch to a different OS. OpenSolaris is industrial strength and built to scale from the get go. The live CD makes it simple to boot to a fully functional desktop environment, including Firefox and Thunderbird. Try it without fear -- our instant rollback feature works like a giant undo button, so your system is always protected, and you'll never lose work. And, you can load OpenSolaris 2008.05 easily in a variety of virtualization technologies including the open source VirtualBox hypervisor.

The OpenSolaris Operating System contains many new features thatare not available with the current Solaris 10 update but, per the OpenSolaris and Solaris release model, may be included in subsequent Solaris 10 updates and milestone releases. Most notably, the addition of an easy-to-use graphical installation experience, ZFS as the default root file system, a network-based image package management system (IPS) with access to a full suite of software, the ability to more easily update between releases of the operating system, and a more familiar environment for those used to Linux based operating environments.

This VMWare image lets you try it out without installing it or even rebooting your machine, and works in the Free VMWare player.
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md5sum: 6f24e3e4fb243a36ea3978e118411df0 OpenSolaris2008.05.7z

Open Solaris 2008.05 VMware Image (load balanced mirrors)