I thought that Sun might announce something like Ubuntu on Solaris this week at the JavaOne conference, but it didn’t turn out that way. Still, “Project Indiana,” led by Ian Murdock, seems like it’s headed in that direction. Tom DiNaro pointed me at a ZDNet article from /. that discusses the possibility.

The basic idea here would be to graft the Debian/Ubuntu userland apps onto the Solaris rootstock, giving Sun the advantages of both: broad developer familiarity and ISV adoption from Linux and the stability (and familiarity on the infrastructure side) of Solaris. Murdock is quoted in the article as saying that he wants to make Solaris a better Linux than Linux.

[Later: the emphasis at the show seems to have been on Sun’s RIA entrant, JavaFX. More here.]