OpenSolaris Live CD Impressions

[LowSky]

OK I got the LiveCD running on my Lenovo T60 (ATI graphics work), I then installed it on my home computer (atlon64 3700+, 2GB RAM, Nvidia 8600gt) and it was fast and very sleek, only problem was it completely messed up my Linux partition and also Grub. Thank God I installed Windows on a seperate Hard drive, I just booted directly to it and the deleted the Solaris parition.

Oddly enough when I went to fix grub with a Ubuntu 8.04 LiveCD,I couldn't get the live CD to boot, kept bringing me to some Debian Busybox thing. Some reason a 7.10 disk worked fine.

Other than my woes, what I like was the seemingly lower processor use and neat Nimbus theme (using it right now in Ubuntu). What I didn't like was the repos that had little or nothing of use. I might try Nexenta (sp?) as it has a proper Apt-get Debian Repo installed. I think if I wanted to run nothing but unix I would use OpenSolaris. I has all the normal things like Firefox and pidgen and Evolution and it install thevideo drivers and has compiz active, but it misses the mark with not having enough access to things like plugins for DVD playing and Wine. I bet in time OpenSolaris will be as good if not better than Ubuntu, and if Microsoft can actually prove that Linux is ripping them off, them many opensource people will move from linux to unix.

[handy]

That's nowhere near the 2008.05 release. If you want to look at some pretty pictures:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...s_200805&num=1

I'm not really interested in playing with Solaris again at the moment, maybe sometime in the future?

It looks to have developed a long way in the last 18 months... good.

By the way, the machine I installed it on had a fast 64bit processor & 2Gb of RAM.

Here is a link to Nexenta, which uses the OpenSolaris Kernel, APT & GNU Linux repo's!

http://www.nexenta.org/os

I installed it some time ago, when it too had a long way to go, it will be much better now though.

Nexenta is now in the process of developing a marriage between APT & the ZFS, which is cool, perhaps one day we will all be able to use ZFS in Linux/BSD as well?

http://www.nexenta.org/os/TransactionalZFSUpgrades

[cardinals_fan]

Nexenta is now in the process of developing a marriage between APT & the ZFS, which is cool, perhaps one day we will all be able to use ZFS in Linux/BSD as well?

Our dear friend the GPL restricts the use of CDDL licensed code... even though the source is available! NetBSD and FreeBSD (perhaps OpenBSD as well) have projects under way to port ZFS to their respective platforms. I can't wait to see it in NetBSD.

[handy]

Our dear friend the GPL restricts the use of CDDL licensed code... even though the source is available! NetBSD and FreeBSD (perhaps OpenBSD as well) have projects under way to port ZFS to their respective platforms. I can't wait to see it in NetBSD.

I don't expect it will become available under the GPL in a hurry, but we can hope, Sun is capable of changing the license.

[LaRoza]

I just tried the OpenSolaris livecd a few hours ago. I spent hours on it without thinking about it. It has all the standard GNOME tools and its driver support was (for me) as good/better than Linux (on the live cd). Compiz worked and all hardware worked. Interestingly, my headphones (my preferred sound device) were automatically used instead of my speakers. Installing flash was simple and didn't require me to restart Firefox (although it said it did).

I found OpenSolaris's theme to be very nice and its speed very admirable (remember, I was on a live cd, but didn't feel any lag during use)

So, in short, I spent several hours on it chatting on IRC and watching youtube. It sounds like a winner to me.

[cardinals_fan]

The OpenSolaris live CD is one of the best I've ever tried. The installed OS was considerably less pleasant - for me. You can read about my trials and tribulations (complete with extremely helpful responses) at http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thre...61548&tstart=0.

My last post (I'm toast) explains what my real problems were. As a replacement for standard Ubuntu, I would probably love OpenSolaris. But I was looking for something more like NetBSD or Slackware.

[cmay]

i just played around whit the opensolaris live cd. if there is a 64bit version for my new computer i will install it. however i was surprised to see a unix system other than linux whit gnome. it looks cool but the session i had was whitout any internet acces. unlike linux that just find these things.
the solaris look and feel is very much like my debian lenny setup so i felt very much "at home "
all in all a very nice experience.

[jrusso2]

My experience with OpenSolaris wasn't quite as nice as yours.

The Live CD was painfully slow to load (over 20 minutes) and I never did get a usable desktop. It looked pretty spiffy (the gnome desktop that is) but I couldn't move my mouse more than a few inches without the cd-rom spinning back up and reading for another ten minutes. Never did get to check anything out.

I realize that my system specs are at the bare minimum for OpenSolaris so I expected it to be sluggish, but I at least expected to be able to click around a little and see what's under the hood. On the plus side it looks like all my hardware was recognized and it even setup my HP printer for me. No error messages of any kind. It just wasn't designed to run on low-end machines like mine (P4, 3Ghz, 512MB).

By contrast, the Ubuntu live cd's run fine on my machine.

Dig

I think your problem is ram. Another 512 mb or more would make it a lot better. I think you have plenty of CPU for it.

[digger95]

I think your problem is ram. Another 512 mb or more would make it a lot better. I think you have plenty of CPU for it.

Yeah I suspect you're right. But in the end I'm kinda glad it didn't work out. I'm really very happy with Slackware. If Solaris had worked well, I'd have installed it to my hard drive, played with it for a few days, then just gone back to Slackware anyway. So I count it as a 'near-miss'.

[cardinals_fan]

Yeah I suspect you're right. But in the end I'm kinda glad it didn't work out. I'm really very happy with Slackware. If Solaris had worked well, I'd have installed it to my hard drive, played with it for a few days, then just gone back to Slackware anyway. So I count it as a 'near-miss'.

Slack is the best