Open Solaris: Your thoughts?


Recommended Posts

honestly ive never heard of it, but if it's anything like ubuntu, im sure ill digg it.

OpenSolaris.png

Well it does use the latest Gnome like Hardy does.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Open Solaris looks a lot better than Ubuntu IMO.

Haven't used it since it won't install on my system as it requires a minimum of 768MB RAM.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I know. The only other thing I can is that it requires much higher specs than other *nixes.

No it doesn't.

Does it have potential?

Will it achieve Ubuntu Popularity and dominance?

It's geared towards stability, self-healing and doesn't have a license nor rabid community that wants every thing under the sun open source or not be looked at (i.e. the driver vs. patent situation a la NVidia). The focus on the kernel is entirely different than in Linux. The 2008.05 release should still be considered beta, tho. The problem here is momentum and driver support. Ubuntu has way more momentum, and OpenSolaris' driver support isn't the best, but also not as bad as everyone makes it out to be. See my sig, that hardware's run without problems. If Sun's giving it an effort, it can make it a very attractive option, primarily for enterprise first, tho. Things needed to make it more popular would be finally starting the stable repository (the current one gets updated biweekly with the newest bits*) and filling it with third party applications beyond what's delivered with Solaris Express.

(*: Which shouldn't be a problem, since they're operating on a production code quality mentality. Means public bi-weekly bits are close to production quality. Wonky features won't hit the main gate until they're stable. Similar to BSD development.)

Edited by Tom Servo
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I ordered a free Open Solaris DVD. I installed it in Virtual Box and its very slow in VM even after allotting 1 GB of DDR2 RAM. Installation took more than 2 hours.

Open Solaris is not Linux, its Unix and its meant for Software Development for Solaris Platform especially in Laptop (as the documentation says). I think you should try Solaris 10 i didnt installed it but i know it low in requirement than Open Solaris.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

VM performance isn't indicative for real hardware performance. Going by that, DragonflyBSD would be really ****, since it crawls like hell in VirtualBox, yet flies on real hardware.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I guess I have to repeat this here, too, after posting it in the other thread.

The situation with Solaris is going from an Apple-esque only on Sun hardware situation (mostly SPARC) to the broad x86 world. Subsystems have to be put in place, drivers have to be created, the kernel adapted, and so on. Considering how Solaris, like BSD, is designed (especially since enterprise is a target) and not hacked and patched, this takes a while. For instance, power management is a big one. On SPARC, it has stellar support for power management, on x86 it's still ongoing work since x86 is only an accepted platform at Sun since the release of AMD64.

In short that means that you shouldn't expect wonders at kernel level. The userland is practically the same as with any other *nix. Though in the case of Solaris, you still have to compile a lot of things from source (and witness how so-called portability proves as bull****) until there are OpenSolaris IPS repositories with third party stuff (coming).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Though in the case of Solaris, you still have to compile a lot of things from source (and witness how so-called portability proves as bull****) until there are OpenSolaris IPS repositories with third party stuff (coming).

If they can make the process similar to FreeBSD's /usr/ports and "make clean install" then I don't mind compiling from source repositories. I'll get OpenSolaris a spin when they get those features in place.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

They're not going the ports way. For Project Indiana, they've written this package repository from scratch, integrating ZFS functionality (ZFS clones for system updates, rollback for botched installs, etc). If at all, it'll be binary packages all the way.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I guess I have to repeat this here, too, after posting it in the other thread.

The situation with Solaris is going from an Apple-esque only on Sun hardware situation (mostly SPARC) to the broad x86 world. Subsystems have to be put in place, drivers have to be created, the kernel adapted, and so on. Considering how Solaris, like BSD, is designed (especially since enterprise is a target) and not hacked and patched, this takes a while. For instance, power management is a big one. On SPARC, it has stellar support for power management, on x86 it's still ongoing work since x86 is only an accepted platform at Sun since the release of AMD64.

In short that means that you shouldn't expect wonders at kernel level. The userland is practically the same as with any other *nix. Though in the case of Solaris, you still have to compile a lot of things from source (and witness how so-called portability proves as bull****) until there are OpenSolaris IPS repositories with third party stuff (coming).

this has been adapted with the linux'esque "Nexenta" OS. the opensolaris OS with Ubuntu's Gnome desktop.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Looks like linux.

And yes. I did mean to sound as vague as I could with that :p

I think it'd be impossible to judge it without trying it. And to be perfectly honest, I cannot be bothered to try it. I've been using linux on and off for a few years now, and it's come a long way on the desktop scene. Using Open Solaris just seems like a step back into the days where things were less friendly. The days where you had to manually hunt around the web for tutorials and articles to get even the most basic hardware working to some degree.

Now, like I said, it'd be impossible to judge it properly without trying it - I'm just going by what I've heard from other people's experience with open solaris. The general jist seems to be, it's linux 3 years ago with a bit more gloss.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Looks like Gnome.

Oh, yes, well that was the desktop I got when I tried it. It's cool, but I couldn't get a few things running, and when I tried to find support online (free advice), I couldn't, for my needs at least. So I went back to Ubuntu, which works on my machine (with a couple of easy-to-find internet-provided tweaks).

OpenSolaris is cool though, and I wish it luck. Sun is cool too for being such good supporters of free software. :yes:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I ordered a Solaris developer DVD (it was free). It took one hour to install (comparable Slackware or Windows install is under 25 minutes on my computer). I don't know about OpenSolaris, but X was so buggered up that I couldn't fix it after first install and configuration.

IMO, there's not much in "userland" to distinguish BSD from Linux from Solaris. XFS is pretty cool though from end-user perspective. And if they all decide to open-source their development efforts and desktop customization, you can end up with mostly the same desktop environment anyways.

For most of use desktop users, the APPS make the OS work or not.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.