Submitted by rich_c on July 23, 2009 - 2:48am
Here are a few thoughts on the latest OpenSolaris.
I bought a copy of Linux Format August 2009 recently, which had a DVD with an iso for OpenSolaris 2009.06. As we use UNIX quite a lot at work, including Solaris, I thought I'd burn it to CD to take a look and then pass on the disk to folks at work that might want to have a play with it for training purposes.
My very first impressions were quite welcoming. There was a familiar GRUB screen, followed by a slightly quaint mix of attractive blue splash screen and quite old skool text including prompts for keyboard layout and preferred language. The Live CD automatically logged in to the Gnome desktop as a user called jack. Jack's password is jack, btw. Not sure if that's documented anywhere on the CD... The desktop is a pretty pleasant and standard looking Gnome offering. There aren't very many apps (No OpenOffice.org?) pre-installed but the package manager looks reasonably user friendly, so I'm sure once you're connected to the internet that could be easily rectified by installing whatever you needed. On the Dell Inspiron 1501 I used as a test machine, getting onto the internet could be a bit of an issue though. OpenSolaris' device manager showed both the wireless and ethernet adaptor's Broadcom drivers as 3rd party and missing! It would appear that to rectify the situation, you'd have to download and install the driver which would involve copying files onto a usb drive or something from a PC that has a working network connection then on your OpenSolaris box, open a terminal to use the command line to set it all up. This would be almost unthinkable with a modern Linux distribution but I guess OpenSolaris is aimed more at users who wouldn't be put off too much by getting stuck in. Among the few pre-installed apps are Firefox and Thunderbird. Nice and familiar for browsing and email duties once you're on a network. There is a link to some introductory html documents on the desktop but, again, without a working network adaptor you're not going to get the best out of them as there are links to exernal pages. Apart from the work that might be required detailed above, the other slight letdown was that it wasn't immediately apparent to this Linux user how to shut down! There's an option to log out but no shutdown/restart. At work we use special scripts to reboot our UNIX servers so I'm not familiar with the native Solaris usage of the shutdown command. Despite figuring out that root's password is opensolaris, I had to resort to the power button to close the machine down. Not terribly elegant!
So, to conclude, I'd say that OpenSolaris is perfectly OK for someone who wants to gain some technical experience with a system that could no doubt be turned into a very useful one indeed! For anyone that wants it all there and ready to go, you'd want SimplyMepis... Or, indeed, the Linux distro that was also on the DVD that came with the magazine I bought. Linux Mint 7 Gloria, which I also tested on the Dell laptop used for this test, was altogether a much more straightforward experience with an extremely attractive modified Gnome desktop. So whatever your requirements, give one of them a go!
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Update
by rich_c - Jul 23 2009 - 9:09pm
Having fired up the Live CD on a Dell Optiplex GX520 at work, the first thing I noticed was that the Broadcom gigabit Ethernet controller was recognised no bother. Good job I'd had the presence of mind to pull the network cable before booting or I might have had questions to answer...
The other thing was I found a bit of info about the lack of shutdown/reboot options. It's apparently due to Gnome power management being disabled on the Live CD to ensure it'll work with as low as 512mb memory. To shutdown or reboot, you fire up a terminal and enter pfexec reboot or pfexec shutdown. The pfexec command is basically sudo, as far as I can make out.
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