Solaris10 Beta6 or Express 8/04 or Build 63, is due in the next 24 hours. As usual, documentation is already online and Alan Hargreaves is anxious to get the good word out. In this release we still do not see the debut of ZFS or the advanced services infastructure, however this might be the biggest of the little releases. Tons of changes have gone in and this is probly the longest list of major features we’ve seen in a long time. Some of the highlights include BIND 9 (YES!), Sendmail 8.13, kadb has been repalced with KMDB (mdb -K), VTS 6.0, libusb upgrade, Samba improvements, new IPSec/NAT and DHCP features, Zones-Wide Resource Control and much much more.

But, above all the amazing additions and improvements in this release the crown has to go to improvements in ls. Thats right folks, you’ve always thought rounding atimes/mtimes to the nearest minute was stupid, but no longer! Introducting ls -e and ls -E, providing seconds and nanoseconds to your ls output. It’s about time.