Sun Microsystems is offering early-access releases of both the Sparc and Intel versions of Solaris 8, now due in February, for the knockdown price of $20 (to cover materials and documentation). It is wooing Linux users with the inclusion of Perl and GNU development tools in Solaris 8. With the new release, the Solaris kernel is "hardened". So if a system runs out of resources when it gets a request for memory, it rejects the request as opposed to shutting down. According to Sun, all Solaris applications are forward compatible with Solaris 8. This means there's no need for applications upgrades. Solaris 8 also supports Java 2SE, the Java Media Framework for streaming media, PDA synchronisation and other goodies. ®