Anyone tried out OpenSolaris?

Jongi · #1 2008-05-06, 02:31 PM CDT

OpenSolaris Indiana announced

Apparently needs 768MB RAM. The installer will not even let you attempt if you have less.

***Dan*** · #2 2008-05-06, 03:30 PM CDT

DLing the LiveCD now. I'll let ya know ...

marko · #3 2008-05-06, 03:35 PM CDT

I ran it very well in qemu-kvm in F9 Preview

stefan1975 · #4 2008-05-06, 03:37 PM CDT

i've been running it for some time now, even the SXDE developer edition. Opensolaris is absolutely great imho. ZFS is totally excellent and blows away even ext4 imho and stuff like Staroffice, SunStudio12, Dtrace are excellent apps and now even with a binary packagemanager to complete all its goodness (hey the debian guy is now in charge there, what more could you want). I have been a SUN admin for years so OpenSolaris has a soft spot with me. For me it could be The Server distro to use. I also really like the Nimbus theme and wallpaper.

....on the other hand, as a workstation user it has little to offer i think, it is not "free", it uses stable but old software (gnome 2.20 anyone?), very few packages in the repos, IPS is not as mature as apt-get or yum yet, it is just plain vanilla gnome with few addons, basic hardware support, no networkmanager like fedora has. basic laptop support, for linux experts the structure of solaris might need getting used to and the default shell is ksh i believe.

I'd place OpenSolaris with CentOS and Debian-Stable rather then the likes of fedora, OpenSuSe or Arch, great for a server but so-so as a desktop, but then again i wouldn't run bleeding edge xorg-server 1.5 on my servers yet.

just my 2c,
stefan

***Dan*** · #5 2008-05-06, 04:29 PM CDT

Hmmm.

Didn't really play well with my laptop. 4 drivers were missing. This is the first time an OS has failed to have the drivers for my sound card. I can forgive the 1394, even the bloody WIN-modem failures, I guess, but the sound card is really basic stuff!

Not going to be a top shelf item around here.

Dan

***Dan*** · #6 2008-05-06, 05:37 PM CDT

Supplemental report:

Just tried it in the graphics machine. This one --

It couldn't find a driver for the VIA chipset NIC, and when I disabled that in the BIOS and just kept the PCI 3com ... the hardware/driver utility crashed on startup. However, it at least did that reliably. <..

..>

Sooooo ... This one is a two-for-two non-starter here.

It's a little weird how a company with so much on the ball with Star Office and Openoffice.org, could fail so miserably at such a simple thing as a liveCD distro. Go figure?! <..

..>

Dan

***leigh123linux*** · #7 2008-05-06, 05:44 PM CDT

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dan

Supplemental report:

Just tried it in the graphics machine. This one --

It couldn't find a driver for the VIA chipset NIC, and when I disabled that in the BIOS and just kept the PCI 3com ... the hardware/driver utility crashed on startup. However, it at least did that reliably. <..

..>

Sooooo ... This one is a two-for-two non-starter here.

It's a little weird how a company with so much on the ball with Star Office and Openoffice.org, could fail so miserably at such a simple thing as a liveCD distro. Go figure?! <..

..>

Dan

At least Sun improved vbox

, they added dkms support and automatic config of vboxusers !!

Reisswolf · #8 2008-05-06, 06:49 PM CDT

It didn't recognise my NIC either, but I was able to plumb for it manually.

I don't know why I like Solaris so much. Yes, ZFS is great, and DTrace is one of the best administrative and diagnostic tools one could ask for. But it took a great deal of patience, probing and tweaking before I was able to play videos in Solaris.

Yet I like to install the new versions and keep abreast of all the developments at Solaris. Maybe the reason is because with Linux usage being so widespread now, I need something else to give me that "elite fix."

That, and the fact that Solaris is a kick-rear operating system.

stevea · #9 2008-05-06, 08:25 PM CDT

Quote:

Originally Posted by stefan1975

i've been running it for some time now, even the SXDE developer edition. Opensolaris is absolutely great imho. ....
....on the other hand, as a workstation user it has little to offer i think, it is not "free", it uses stable but old software (gnome 2.20 anyone?), very few packages in the repos, ...

Sincere Thanks for the nice thumbnail review Stefan. I've used solaris a few yr ago, but just briefly played w/ OpenSol... I've had discussions w/ the local Sun rep recently and they are confident in the performance. Like most BSD clones it "feels" bit "boney" and thin, but that's not a bad thing for a server.

But ... I think it's unfair to compare ZFS (available since '04) with the still-experimental ext4; especially using opinion rather than an even a basic numerical comparison. There are just too many other issues in the way to "feel" the FS performance difference in isolation.

-S

Reisswolf · #10 2008-05-06, 09:25 PM CDT

This is probably not the right forum for this question, but does anyone know if the advent of OpenSolaris means that Sun will stop releasing SXDE?

I certainly hope not.

*****

Edit

Never mind! From Sun's page:

Quote:

Note: This marks the end of the SXDE program. To provide a smooth transition, the SXDE 1/08 site will remain available through July of 2008. At that time, the site will be taken down and links redirected to the OpenSolaris site. Existing SXDE documentation will remain available on docs.sun.com and at the Solaris Developer Center. Thank you for your support and participation. We look forward to seeing you at opensolaris.com.

Seve · #11 2008-05-06, 10:00 PM CDT

Hello:
I could never get my nic working correctly with it .... ?

Now, I didn't spend a lot of time trying, but other than that pretty much everything seemed to function pretty well.

Seve

dubb · #12 2008-05-06, 10:14 PM CDT

feels like linux to me. but just like seve says the nic card doesnt work. i didn't spend much time messing with it. but it does look nice.

***Dan*** · #13 2008-05-06, 11:03 PM CDT

Grrrrr!

This thing couldn't find its own bloody backside in a hall of mirrors at high noon, using both hands and a persistant itch to guide them!

...

... and I'll never bad-mouth bash again! Sheesh!

Dan

bmvbab · #14 2008-05-06, 11:09 PM CDT

Nice one Dan :0
I tried one of the early versions, not a great desktop OS when we compare with Linux distros like FC, Ubuntu, Suse, Mandrake, etc....they need more experience I guess

stefan1975 · #15 2008-05-06, 11:55 PM CDT

Quote:

Originally Posted by stevea

But ... I think it's unfair to compare ZFS (available since '04) with the still-experimental ext4; especially using opinion rather than an even a basic numerical comparison. There are just too many other issues in the way to "feel" the FS performance difference in isolation-S

Hi stevea,

you are right that this is not a technical comparison at all, it is merely a description of what I "feel" about OpenSolaris and I took ext4 from the top off my head since it is the "next big thing" on linux/fedora. I also could have said ext3/reiser/etc. It is just my opinions that ZFS is a Really Great filesystem, great performance and as easy to manage and resize as directories on disk, so not just performance wise but also security/size/safety/manageability wise.

Also the containers and the differentation of user rights (no sudo or root workarounds) are very big pros of Solaris, but again I did mean to get technical here not would I recommend it as a desktop OS.

stefan