New Solaris 10 Installer

SXDE3 (Solaris Express Developers Edition v3 9/07) sports a nice, new graphical installation, designed to make it easy for the casual user to install Solaris. Considering the large numbers of downloads of Solaris 10 for non-Sun hardware, this is a long overdue improvement.

Sarah Jelinek has posted a few screenshots of the installer in action. Very nice.

Jan McGinn has posted an interview with Frank Ludolph, the Senior Interaction Designer responsible for greatly simplifying the user experience of installing and upgrading the Solaris operating system.

We decided to replace the old installer. The UI team reviewed a number of current operating system installers, both proprietary (Mac OS X and Windows) and open source (SUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu). We decided the goal of the installer should be to do minimal configuration during install; just enough to get you up and running following reboot.
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Then Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE), a fast-moving project targeted at developers, appeared. This project had fewer functional requirements than on the full installer and allowed for a phased implementation of the installer.