This section describes additional new features in this release. These features and enhancements add to the existing exhaustive collection of utilities, services, and tools that facilitate enhanced productivity.
The Oracle Solaris desktop environment has been updated from GNOME 2.30 to GNOME 3.24 in Oracle Solaris 11.4. Core desktop applications also have been updated. Some optional applications are no longer included in Oracle Solaris. Users can choose between the modern GNOME Shell environment or the GNOME Classic environment on the login screen. For more details see Oracle Solaris 11.4 Desktop.
Oracle Solaris 11.4 no longer supports a multi-level labeled Trusted Extensions desktop and no longer supports Sun Ray configurations. For more details see End of Feature Notices for Oracle Solaris 11.
In Oracle Solaris 11.4, man pages using the System V sections have been renumbered to the standard sections. The sections 1m, 4, 5, 7, and their subsections used in the previous releases are now 8, 5, 7, 4, and their subsections respectively. Users who are familiar with other platforms such as BSD, Linux, or MacOS X can use the same section numbers with the man command.
The man command supports searching of the hierarchical man page name, which contains one or more slashes. For example, man system/name-service/switch can display the man page from usr/share/man/man8s/system/name-service/switch.8s.
The man command also supports the abbreviation style for the subsections. For example, the printf(3C) man page can be searched by either by using man printf.3 or man -s 3 printf.
The man command can map the old System V section numbers to the standard ones when necessary, to help find references from older documentation.
For more information, see the man(1) man page.
The Oracle Solaris Online Documents for RAD and Web Dashboard application displays searchable documents in the Oracle Solaris System Web Interface Dashboard. To access documentation served by this application, use the System Web Interface Dashboard Application menu. Documents are installed by IPS packages to the following location: /usr/lib/webui/htdocs/solaris/apps/docs.
The Oracle Solaris System Web Interface Dashboard is the only access point for RAD API documentation. For documents that might be available from multiple locations, System Web Interface Dashboard access is very convenient.
For more information, see the odoc-bundle(5) and odoctool(1) man pages.
paps converts text to PostScript language using the Pango library. paps reads an input file and writes a PostScript language or user specified format rendering of the file to standard output. paps accepts international text in any locale and provides internationalized text layout including text shaping and bidirectional text rendering.
For more information, see the paps(1) man page.
The Oracle Solaris iconv command and iconv() API have been modernized to use the cconv API internally for conversion. cconv is a unified conversion mechanism that uses Unicode as an intermediate encoding. cconv supports a wide range of codesets and provides the geniconvtbl command to generate conversion tables with customized conversion rules.
For more information, see the iconv(1), iconv(3C), cconv(3C), cconv_open(3C), cconv_close(3C), cconvctl(3C), geniconvtbl(1), and geniconvtbl-cconv(5) man pages.
This new Oracle Solaris 11.4 feature extends the search capability of the gettext command to additional directories. When locating a message catalog, the gettext command also searches fallback directories based on language and territory, such as fr_FR and fr, in addition to fr_FR.UTF-8. This feature enables the gettext command to behave in a way similar to other UNIX operating systems.
For more information, see the gettext(3C) man page.
Oracle Solaris 11.4 is certified to conform to The Open Group UNIX V7 Product Standard. This certification is significantly enhanced over the previous UNIX 03 certification. The most significant change is the alignment with the Single UNIX Specification, Version 4, that includes The Open Group Base Specifications, Issue 7, and approved Technical Corrigenda. This version also enables certified systems to support role-based access control as an option.
When using the Oracle Developer Studio 12.5 or 12.6 C compiler, or the latest versions of gcc, or LLVM or clang found in Oracle Solaris 11.4, Oracle Solaris 11.4 supports:
The ANSI X3.159-1989 Programming Language – C and ISO/IEC 9899:1990 Programming Language – C (C) interfaces
ISO/IEC 9899:1990 Amendment 1:1995: C Integrity
ISO/IEC 9899:1999 Programming Languages – C
INCITS/ISO/IEC 9899:2011 Programming Languages – C
For more information, see IEEE Std 1003.1TM-2008/The Open Group Technical Standard Base Specifications, Issue 7. You can also see the standards(7) man page.
Oracle Solaris UTF-8 locales have been updated to version 8.0 of the Unicode standard. Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems.
Oracle Solaris 11.4 locales have been updated to CLDR version 28, which provides improvements to locale data quality. For more information, see the International Language Environments Guide for Oracle Solaris 11.4.