As I wrote in a previous post I was considiring trying out the new OpenSolaris 2005.08. And so I did.
I downloaded the installation image from the project’s web site, burned it and booted from it. The live cd experience was pleasant, it bore a heavy resemblance to that of Ubuntu. There is a nice driver information application that shows you which devices OpenSolaris managed to detect and install drivers for, and the ones it detected but didn’t have drivers for. I had issues with my on board ethernet adapter so I bought a ethernet adapter using the tested and true Realtek 8139 chipset. It worked like a charm with Solaris. All of my other hardware was working OK, except for my X-Fi sound card. I was pleasantly surprised to see that my display’s resolution was properly configured to 1680×1050(the video adapter is RadeonHD 2900Pro, hence the surprise). GNOME’s OpenSolaris theme matches the new default look and feel of Swing apps from the upcoming Java 6u10 and looks great in my opinion.
The installer is nothing special, but it gets the job done. I had some issues with it partitioning my hard drive the first time I ran it, but the second all went fine(I would have partitioned the drive by hand had I figured out how to use Solaris’s version of fdisk). The installation went smoothly from there. After it finished and I rebooted I was again pleasantly surprised to see that Solaris had generated a GRUB configuration section for my Windows XP installation, though it had generated the same section twice for some reason.
I have to say that OpenSolaris boots considerably slower than say Ubuntu. When you log in, GNOME also take more time to load completely than I’m used to. The set of apps you’ll find installed by default is pretty standard – Firefox 2 as the web browser, Thunderbird 2 as the e-mail client and the usual GNOME productivity tools. The only big missing player is OpenOffice, but it’s in the default repository. Java 6 is installed by default(only the JRE though). Python and Perl are also in, Ruby and gcc are not.
I dowloaded the latest OSS version for Solaris and with it I got sound right away from my X-Fi. Finding mp3 codec for Solaris was another story entirely… The GUI frontend to IPS(OpenSolaris’ package management system) is not bad, but it’s light years away from Synaptic. One should however consider the fact that the frontend is at version 0.1. I used it to install OpenOffice – it worked fine. The package selection available is pretty slim, but I guess that it will improve as the OS becomes more popular.
I was very disappointed with the lack of decent documentation on the project’s web site. Sure there are some installation notes and some docs about IPS, but a such a venture surely requires a handbook similar to FreeBSD’s. There are many differences between Linux and Solaris utilities of the same name and no central information hub for Solaris which one to consult should the need arise. Also – the package naming convention in the default repository is awful. All package names start with SUN which I personaly find confusing and annoying.
All in all OpenSolaris is a good OS, but I has a long way to go before it’s ready for the prime time. The most compelling reasons not to switch to Solaris now are probably the lack of documentation and prepackaged software. The system itself is solid and worth a try, especially if you have more time to spare to play with it.
