Since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems last year, the future of the Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems have been called into question especially as the OpenSolaris 2010.1H release was missing and has been that way for months now with no official communication from Oracle. A new OpenSolaris release hasn't come in more than a year and we still are left wondering if or when it will arrive.

While Sun Microsystems puts their weight behind the GNOME desktop environment for Solaris and OpenSolaris, there are developers that do work on providing a quality experience for KDE on OpenSolaris. However, getting KDE to run on a clean OpenSolaris installation can require building KDE from source and taking various other steps.

OpenSolaris 2008.5, the new distribution based on the OpenSolaris operating system, has been released into the wild. This release follows the conventions set by many of the popular Linux distributions, such as being based on a single live CD with installer, but also adds a load of OpenSolaris-specific features such as ZFS, DTrace, Containers, and a new package management system, IPS.

OpenSolaris 2010.03 was supposed to have been released earlier this month. However, March is coming to an end and there still is no sign of OpenSolaris 2010.03. Oracle, which now owns Sun Microsystems, has also not provided us with any comment on the situation nor have they addressed the OpenSolaris community.

OpenSolaris came out with its third release last week and within a year there seems to have been some pretty good progress. The biggest question hanging over OpenSolaris is whether Oracle will decide to continue the project.

While Sun Microsystems may have struggled with making money from its OpenSolaris operating system prior to Sun's acquisition by Oracle, that doesn't mean that others haven't had better success.

OpenSolaris 2009.06 was released earlier this year, but unlike in years past and contrary to their original six month release cycle, there will not be another OpenSolaris distribution release in 2009. Instead, the next slated release is OpenSolaris 2010.02. We have screenshots.

Opensolaris 2010.05 would be the next release after being postponed to release on March this year. Again, Opensolaris lovers around the world might be disappointed because after waiting for it until the end of May there is no official release of Opensolaris. A bad news.

The OpenSolaris community is concerned by the silence from Oracle over its future plans for the open source operating system. In a blog posting, OpenSolaris developer Peter Tribble complained that Oracle has not mentioned OpenSolaris.