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OpenSolaris 2008.11 – Year of the Laptop?
Ahmed Kamal writes "Is Linux getting too old for you? Are you interested to see what other systems such as OpenSolaris have to offer? OpenSolaris has some great features, such as ZFS and dtrace, which make it a great server OS — but how do you think it will fare on a laptop? Let's take an initial look at the most recent OpenSolaris 2008.11 pre-release on recentish laptop hardware."
I am interested to see more stories that are not advertising or shout outs develop on laptops reading slashdot. Down with the "Check out my favorite thing" posts.
I know it is cool to try out different OSes from time to time, but is there really any solid technical reason why anyone would choose solaris on a laptop over linux?
Count me among those who don't care.
It's Open Solaris. It will be a decade before Sun settles with Novell to grant the right to open Solaris, which right Sun previously bought from SCO, who didn't actually own it. In the mean time if you code for this your output's ownership will always be in doubt. It is better to code on a platform where the exegenesis is more certain.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I've never quite gotten what people mean by classifying operating systems in these two categories. Okay, it runs GNOME, office programs, and Firefox, isn't that enough to make it a desktop operating system? Hey look, it can run apache, sendmail, and bind, it's a server operating system too!
Seems to me it's just an operating system well-rounded for any task, and such vague categories don't really apply to it.
Note that this maneuver yields no profit.
I age at the exact same speed Linux does.
I record my sleeptalking
Sorry, but what in the hell does openSolaris have to do with 'Year of the Laptop'?
Parent. Read it. Moderate it. And then moderate this post redundant. I don't care for my Karma, but I don't want rational viewpoints to be silenced, nor the moderation system to be abused. And if this gets modded down then that's the way it is, but at least you had a choice.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
SCO did not have the right to grant Sun the right to open Solaris. This is a proven legal fact. Novell owns that right, and they have not yet granted it.
Open Solaris is and will be in doubt until Novell endorses it. Until then it's pirate software and no more legal than "Hot XP SP3 Warezz NOKEY" from TPB.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If you code on anything besides Linux the evil proprietary companies will steal your code.
Seriously though - if you write something for OpenSolaris - how is the ownership of your code in doubt? Just like an app written for Linux does not have to be GPL'ed, or an app written for Windows is not owned by Microsoft.
Typical Linux zealotry in action.
Kind of like the Year of the Desktop for Linux.
This is zealotry:
The world is a bridge; pass over it; but build not your dwelling there.
Look. We live in a litigious world. Although it's good guidance to tell programmers to avoid getting involved in discussions of, or reading, patents and their applications, it's a different thing to choose to be ignorant of your field, its history and the decisions surrounding it. The law is the law and it's a waste of time to develop applications that have been obviated by lawyers.
God bless the lawyers. Gently may they swing.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Leave it to the *bsd honks to have the first post in comments on the original article. Need I remind the BSD crowd, at this rate Open Solaris will be just as capable on a laptop long before *bsd fully impliments ZFS properly. Not to mention, you *bsd guys? You might want to disable shmat() if it isn't necessary and turn of SYSV_IPC if you don't need it. There's a new 0day around that exploits what Theo and company didn't fix properly back in 04...*smirk*.
</troll>
The year of the Solaris Desktop!
You're doing this on purpose now, it's never the year of anything.
Plus 2008.11 isn't really a year
If you thought the driver situation was bad for Linux, and worse for *BSD, it's even worser fro OpenSolaris. Yes, I said worser. It's worser enough for me to want to use a fake, worse word to describe it. :(
I mean, great idea guys, but in execution, any OS that locks up solid so you have to ssh in remotely and kill your login session so you can log in, or that makes compilation of something as simple as Quake practically impossible--installed GNU toolchain or not--is it really worth it on commodity hardware?
We have OpenSolaris desktop machines installed at work, and the amount of effort the OpenSolaris users go through.. my god, it's herculean. And I'm making this judgement call sitting atop a farm of NetBSD machines. So you fucking know--you KNOW--that when I say something's a rough ride, you better fucking listen.
Not that it's a complete dearth of utility. There's lots of stuff going for it. I'm just saying. Fair warning.
(P.S. Tinkering with it? Good luck.)
Linux is just fine OS. You can build software systems what you want top of it. Now we have over 400 such systems. Some people say that over 400 distributions are too much and those should be limited for 3-5.
Those who like to play with other OS's than just Windows and Linux (Who says two is enought?), they can get then this OpenSolaris or one of three BSD's.
But question is, who would like to get OS from OpenSolaris, when it is not so different of Linux distributions what use Gnome desktop environment?
OpenSolaris is like Ubuntu but the OS is "just" switched from Linux to SunOS. Both systems includes GNU tools and different system configuration tools (package manager etc) depending about Linux-distribution etc.
I have used OpenSolaris as my main system on laptop on last 3 months and problems are that there are few important drivers missing. Now I want to try this new release if at last, OpenSolaris would get sounds working.
So question is, if you are Windows user and Happy for it. Stick with it. If you ain't happy, think do you want to try Linux as your OS and if answer is "yes", then check what Distribution is best for you. Just forget the OpenSolaris and few *BSD OS's if you ain't ready to play the helpdesk for yourself.
The server at http://www.genunix.org/, where this OpenSolaris 2008.11 ISO is hosted, is responding rather slowly right now (indirect Slashdotting?). So I want to point out that if you'd like to download this build and try it for yourself, you can get it as a torrent here.
I hear there's a company that sells laptops with a BSD OS and decent support... named after some kind of fruit or something.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I understand that the only problem with 2008.11 is that the WiFi support was written by a dyslexic :-)
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Zones/Containers and ZFS.
"bad" - wow, way to enlighten us all! Seriously what is wrong with CDDL, i'm all ears
So this guy tests the Install process, running Firefox and navigating to Youtube, to find out he has to manually install Flash.
He then puts the laptop into suspend, with a successful resume.
Then he declares OpenSolaris the year of the laptop.
Am I missing something? Any additional unit testing? Benchmarks? Usability? Application availability?
Nice Slashvertisement.
Warning: I use OpenSolaris a lot as well, love it for the sake of some serious faults, but it does its job well. That job is NOT running on a laptop however. Good luck to the poor souls who try to use it as a daily driver.
Brent Jones
Some people work with/on Solaris and wouldn't mind taking it with them on the road.
Does OpenSolaris have any device drivers for it? I don't mean to be a troll, but, how is OpenSolaris for running things like 3d graphics cards, SATA hard drives, etc. Will it reasonably install on a desktop with something more than a kick ass command line and basic VESA video drivers?
This is my sig.
There's a ton of Linux distributions for sure, but isn't fair to say that many are branches off of some of the biggies?
There's the debian and cousin ubuntu, red hat, and suse...am I missing something?
This is my sig.
Wow, I wonder what year will be "Year of Plan9 on the laptop"
Is Linux getting too old for you?
Oh right, if Linux is getting too old for you, then clearly what you need to do is pick up a direct genetic (source code) descendant of AT&T System V.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The userspace is a bit archaic - it's classic System V, which makes even a GNU userland look nice.
Make sure /usr/sfw/bin is in your $PATH first, and you'll get all the GNU tool chain in Solaris 10.
Dear Sun, license it under GPL3 and I'll give it a try. Otherwise, I don't see enough advantages over Linux.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
ixsystems?
Didn't now that fruit.
Running software, supporting hardware, and suspending well are about all I expect from a laptop OS. I used OS X 10.4 for ages, and it had terrible performance (although better than 10.0 to 10.3. 10.5 is the first release to not be an embarrassment in that regard). It's not a comprehensive test, of course, but it does show that OpenSolaris is a usable option, even if it isn't the best. I was surprised when I saw OpenSolaris running on a laptop a few years ago, but it seemed to do the job.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Cool, I am looking forward to this release. Going to be testing it out on my HP dv5000z laptop and if it works well then I will be replacing my Ubuntu 8.10...eh...maybe dual boot, too much of a Ubuntu fanboy! :)
Maybe most of the posters here just haven't been around long enough.
The significance of this achievement is that we're talking about the first major, major commerical UNIX having gone to an open source model. We're talking about Solaris running on a laptop of all things, with close to x86 desktop parallelism with Linux. I can't think of IBM (AIX), HP (HP-UX), SGI (Irix), or anyone else even thinking about doing this.
We're talking an operating system with decades of history, gigantic commerical leverage, and very robust, enterprise-class features.
One that you can run on a dinky laptop.
Enjoy it. Appreciate it. Learn something new.
What is "Free" about being told what to do with your own work? "Open" is a much better word to use here but it doesn't work so well for the flag waving the Linux zealots like to do.
I don't use Linux. It's pretty damn good all-in-all but I find its community too self-rightous, smug and selfish for my tastes. Especially the current crop of Ubuntu "loyalists" who look at Canonical's work as the Second Coming while ignoring the hard work of those from whom it is taking so much.
I've used Linux in the past and could very well be using it in the future, but I'll make a point that it will not be a neo-religious distro that I end up on.
Speaking as a software developer, Solaris is one of the worst platforms. Solaris issues occupy a far greater amount of my support burden than its share of the customer base.
SUN regularly changes the API in incompatible ways, all the while denying that they do such thing. In almost every new release of Solaris, something breaks because SUN made an "improvement" and intentionally broke the "unimproved" means.
When you point out specific examples, they say "that wasn't documented". When you point out the specific text in the man page that documents it, they say "man pages are internal documentation, you aren't supposed to use those."
I am relatively neutral on the Linux vs *BSD wars. I use and like both. They do the assigned task, and things which worked yesterday still work today and are likely to continue working tomorrow.
I can't say that about Solaris. It's bad enough being SysV (a horror unto itself) but SUN adds that extra special bit to make it a true nightmare.
SUN is dying as a company. The sooner they die and take Solaris with it, the happier I will be.
As far as I can see Opensolaris as well as Solaris is not widely used on portable computers yet. TuxMobil provides a Survey of Solaris, OpenSolaris & NexentaOS Installation Guides for Laptops and Notebooks. The survey contains links to around 70 installation guides. The overall number of installation guides for Unix operating systems listed at TuxMobil is almost 8,000.
I've installed Open Solaris on 3 different laptops (hp nc6400, dell inspiron 300m, toshiba u205) and 2 desktops (dell workstation with quad xeon and sun ultra 20) and here's my take: 1) open solaris is a really cool idea and i am happy sun has taken this step forward 2) although it installs really easy, the lack of audio drivers (in particular for standard intel chipset) is upsetting. a tech guy at sun told me they are fixing this in the next release. 3) someone posted that it comes with codecs??? really ... the only way i thought you could play mp3's is to deal with fluendo $$$. i never got mp3's to work.
4) the package manager is REALLY nice, but much much slower than e.g. synaptic.
5) if you're used to linux, some things are really challenging in Open Solaris, for example, devices. In linux, it's easy to find your usb drive (e.g. /dev/sdb2) and mount from command line. pardon my general inexperience with solaris, but i found it impossible to sort through the many many many virtual dev that OS uses. long story short ... my quick and easy linux tricks don't work in solaris which make trouble shooting VERY difficult.
5) wireless was hit or miss ... on some laptops, no problem at all. on others - nightmare (i guess this is the case for linux too)
6) acpi (on laptops) is flaky, but same for linux sometimes too.
PROS) i like that sun is trying to give us a complete open source world: open solaris, open office, open jdk, mysql, netbeans, etc.. THAT in itself is so cool: to have one company trying to give you the whole integrated package. all these things together make for a really great laptop/desktop
CONS) your linux skills might not apply when troubleshooting and given x hours of free time in the day, you may not want to dive into solaris ... also, sun's customer support (even with my free trial of ultra 20) is horrible. be prepared to be tossed around to dozen's of customer support people, each of whom seem to know less than you do.
FINALWORD) give it a whirly-ding. it's a great experience and i think the more people that try/use/comment/fix open solaris, the better it will become. i just wish sun would have thought of open sourcing solaris 10 years ago when it could have grown up to be what linux is right now.
Other OSes have to have those now to be taken seriously (I don't take windows seriously).
Which includes Linux, which I have been a fan of for 17 years, since kernel version 0.11.
But now that Solaris is free and open source, I'm happy to get my Unix from the inovators rather than the copiers.
Sun is innovating again and I like it. Not only ZFS but I like the packaging system all around. I have found that both Opensolaris and Linux work well and I simply use both but here is the real kicker for me, I can also get Studio 12. Now gcc is OK but that is about it. I really like having a real compiler and IDE. BTW, gcc is included in the release and Studio 12 is an extra package but it is well worth it. Also, for you Linux fans (includes me as I like both), Studio 12 is available for Linux.
Any problem with movie players, or music players?
Solaris has one massive hangup. Administrators that suck, and only drink Sun Kool-aid. I *hate* solaris with a passion, not so much because of it's performance or technical merit, but because I have to deal with SA's from 1980 who enforce archaic policies that don't relate at all to the systems we run, and why we run them. Top that off with not really understanding new functionality, and it's a recipe for disaster and hatred.
Someone really should have brought up BeOS as the pinnacle of OS excellence by now I would have thought...
Seriously, can we have something new already?
I am not interested in ZFS when I already have RAID/LVM (and ZFS if I use FUSE). dtrace, while a interesting debugger doesn't exaclty do enough to encourage me to just dump my current debugging software, operating system, filesystems, vast repositories for Solaris.
What about updating stuff like crontab to support simple things like @reboot, 5/*? The amount of backwards stuff in Solaris just makes administration more difficult.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
NeXTSTEP didn't sell laptops, iirc. And that's a strangely named fruit.
"Is Linux getting too old for you?
Someone else pointed this out..
Are you interested to see what other systems such as OpenSolaris have to offer?
Oooh, what features might those be?
OpenSolaris has some great features, such as ZFS and dtrace, which make it a great server OS â" but how do you think it will fare on a laptop?
ZFS? How about for Linux, or Mac OS X
DTrace? How about:
$ uname
/usr/sbin/dtrace
Darwin
$ which dtrace
Apparently Linux has no equal, but I've been a Linux sysadmin for many years and didn't have dtrace before, and even now that I have it on my Macbook, I still haven't even learned how to use it, but I understand it can require programming in a C-like language. No thanks. I do programming in Shell, Ruby and Perl, usually in that order. I don't want to relearn C, since I never really liked it to begin with.
ZFS and DTrace aren't compelling reasons to use a particular OS on a workstation (laptop OR desktop) anyway. Userland utility is what uh, users want. Mac OS certainly delivers for both the typical user that wants their browser, IM and music, but they're never going to install Solaris anyway. So your target audience can either pick the "newcomer" who isn't that new, or stick with what they're already using, and use it to get some actual work done, instead of screwing around with other OS's.
MACH != BSD
OpenSolaris 2008.11 is the latest release of the OpenSolaris Operating System, a powerful and complete operating environment for users, developers and deployers. OpenSolaris prides itself on being a secure, stable, and highly scalable system. OpenSolaris OS is open source software, and freely re distributable and provides all the tools users expect from a modern computing environment both installed by default and available on our online network package repositories. -------------- Shakira New Social Bookmarking
Kernel != OS ...and the AC was enlightened.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.