Sun Microsystems has reached an agreement with Toshiba to pre-install the OpenSolaris operating system on Toshiba laptops.

The laptops will be available in the United States from early 2009 and will come with the latest version of OpenSolaris: 2008.11.

"Toshiba and Sun are announcing that we're going to preconfigure and optimize OpenSolaris for certain Toshiba models," said Jim McHugh, Sun's vice president of data center software, in a promotional video.

The firms have yet to release details on availability elsewhere, pricing or which laptop models would feature the operating system.

OpenSolaris is Sun's flagship operating system, designed for desktop, server and high-performance computing environments. Features in OpenSolaris 2008.11 include Time Slider, a graphical interface slide bar that allows users to access previous versions of files.

"Time Slider lets us integrate ZFS [file system] snapshots taken automatically by the system with a standard window environment file browser," said Stephen Hahn, OpenSolaris project lead. "It lets you access previous versions of your source code, of your word-processing document or any other thing that you're saving on your system."

Developers will have greater access to repositories, said Sun, and will be able to deliver code to OpenSolaris users through the updated package manager.

Sun also extended its OpenSolaris subscription options. There will be two subscription plans: 'production' and 'essentials'.