I’ve been playing with Solaris 10 6/06 (or U2, as I’ll refer to it here) – the mid-year update to the Solaris operating system. For what is classed as a minor update, there’s quite a lot here in the new release, such as ZFS, and there’s a lot more hidden behind the scenes that will appeal to both desktop and server users.

I spoke to Chris Ratcliffe at Sun about the new release, and you can hear the well-deserved enthusiasm for this release, not just because of the headline features, but because of some of the other aspects of the new release that I'll get on to later. Ironically, Chris was in the same area and Sun office that I used to work right next door; I'd often visited the office, and even borrowed a CD or two from them during the early days of Solaris testing and deployment at the company I was working at. Sometimes IT really is a smaller community than you realize!