Sun and Toshiba have inked an agreement to deliver pre-installed versions of OpenSolaris on Toshiba laptops by early 2009.

"We are very pleased to announce plans to include the OpenSolaris OS pre-installed on several of our award winning business Laptops," said Carl Pinto, a Toshiba VP. "Sun and Toshiba share a passion for innovation and strong engineering design, and we are excited to be collaborating to optimize OpenSolaris for our platforms," added Pinto.

John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun's Systems Group, said that "breakthrough innovations for developers, deployers and administrators in a freely available software platform combined with global service and support is exciting to everyone."

OpenSolaris, which is based on the Unix System V Release 4 codebase, has undergone significant modifications since Sun purchased code rights in 1994. The operating system currently provides a unique platform for developers and includes a number of new features, including a graphical interface that offers powerful ZDS functionality.

The latest OpenSolaris deal is not expected to have a significant impact on Sun's serious economic woes. Indeed, the company recently announced plans to write down the value of its business and take an impairment charge on elements that comprise $1.8 billion of the corporation's total goodwill. The Santa Clara giant attributed its probable charge to the "current economic environment, operating results, and a sustained decline in Sun's market valuation".

However, Sun may be pinning its future hopes on a new line of servers that offer superior performance by exploiting a multi-brained chip. The new machines are based on four UltraSparc T2 chips, each of which has the core circuitry of eight microprocessors. The four-chip servers are reportedly capable of simultaneously executing 256 threads. X

Check Out
IT Examiner