Upgrading OpenSolaris to Oracle Solaris 11 Express

Today Oracle released Solaris 11 Express and, as described in the Getting Started Guide, there's plenty of installation options:

• An interactive GUI installer in a LiveCD.
• A text installer.
• An automated installer.
• An upgrade path from OpenSolaris.

Yes. If you're running some OpenSolaris machines while waiting for the release that never came, here's the option for you. The upgrade instructions are detailed in the Solaris 11 Express Release Notes:

• If your preferred publisher is not opensolaris.org (release), set it:

# pkg set-publisher -P -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/release/ opensolaris.org

• Perform an image-update:

# pkg image-update

• Reboot into the new boot environment.
• Set the new publishers:

# pkg set-publisher --non-sticky opensolaris.org

# pkg set-publisher --non-sticky extra

# pkg set-publisher -P -g http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release/ solaris

• Read the license:

# pkg image-update 2>&1 | less

• If you accept the license, perform the last image-update:

# pkg image-update --accept

• Reboot into your brand new Oracle Solaris 11 Express boot environment

Oracle Releases Oracle Solaris 11 Express (2010.11)

More than one year after the latest and last OpenSolaris build (2009.06) was released Oracle has finally released a new snapshot of the next generation Solaris 11 Operating System: Solaris 11 Express (snv_151a).

Solaris Express is now available as:

• A text installer: this installer does not install any window manager but it can be easily installed using the Solaris package manager (pkg).
• A LiveCD with a GUI installer (does install the GNOME Desktop Environment).
• An automated installer for network deployments.
• USB install images.

If you want to discover what's new in this release, have a look at this presentation. The most important features I was waiting for are:

• Boot Environments.
• Fast Reboot.
• IPS packaging system.
• Boot Environments for Zones.
• ZFS as the default file system.
• ZFS deduplication.
• ZFS diff.
• ZFS dataset encryption.
• Network virtualization (Project Crossbow).