For the past three years, Sun’s “OpenSolaris” has only been available as a set of files to be unpacked on top of an already-installed Solaris 10 system. The first official stand-alone OpenSolaris release, OpenSolaris 2008.05, is now available for download at http://www.opensolaris.com.

According to the OpenSolaris General FAQ, SPARC support is not in this release but is planned for later in 2008. A six-month release and update schedule is planned.

Sun also announced that OpenSolaris will be an operating system option on Amazon’s EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud.