This is a neat idea (if not technically all that novel)… log in to Sun Learning Services portal, and you can play with a virtual instance of OpenSolaris for up to an hour.
It does require Java, there are only 8 slots available at any one time, and right now they’re still provisioning OpenSolaris 2008.11 rather than the newer and shinier 2009.06. But if you want to give OpenSolaris a quick whirl, you might find it more convenient than downloading the LiveCD.
More info in Brian Leonard’s blog entry.
I could have swore I saw something similar to this several (perhaps close to 3-4 years) ago where they basically had a vnc client (could have been virtualized, I really don’t remember) to different machines running in a browser so you could play with several free OS’s. IIRC, they had several BSD, a few Linux, I think they may have had FreeDOS and ReactOS as options too. Regardless, it was/is a cool idea.
Yeah, I’ve seen it done before too, with variable results. First time I think I’ve we’ve done anything like this with Solaris, though.