OpenSolaris: Your Opinions

[ninjaslim]

What's everyone's opinion on OpenSolaris?

I never really liked OpenSolaris 2008.05, but today I tested 2008.11-RC2, and it's very polished. It reminds me very much of Mac OS X in terms of usability and features (particularly the frontend for ZFS backups akin to Time Machine). I think it has real potential in the desktop market, at least as a desktop Unix.

[tomh009]

How is the breadth of device support on OpenSolaris? I remember from my Solaris 10 investigation that the hardware support was a show-stopper for me at the time.

[ninjaslim]

I haven't really tested it much on real hardware. It works well on my Dell Optiplex GX620, but that's a relatively old machine. It works on Parallels, VirtualBox, and VMWare Fusion, if that counts for anything.

According to other people's experiences, OpenSolaris has expanded hardware support. For example, the Acer Aspire One is almost entirely supported with the exception of a couple of things, which I can't name off the top of my head. I doubt it'd be much of a problem.

[rliegh]

Hardware support has improved drastically over the last 3 years. I last tried it with Solaris Community Express build 99 and it was ok, but it feels sluggish.

It's decent -it does automount a LOT better than FreeBSD currently does. My main problems were with performance (subjectively speaking, it feels slugging) and the fact that it was a LOT more difficult to build from source than NetBSD and FreeBSD are. Also -from a GNU/Zealot viewpoint it's disturbing to have such large parts of the system be distributed 'binary only'.

It's a good Unix; I prefer it to Linux -but I prefer *BSD.

[Weinter]

Yeap I think their Hardware support has reached BSD levels but not yet Linux levels too

I agree it looks rather nice and responsive but I still prefer BSD
Except the ZFS part looks really tempting

[hitest]

It looks very interesting. Yes. It does have the potential to make inroads into the desktop market. Competition is a good thing it makes everyone better.

[cloud]

I liked Solaris which is a system in the same spirit than freebsd but wich tools very powerfull like zone or the admin console. The system to manipulate services is also interesting.

So I have tried the lastest OpenSolaris given at the RMLL this summer and I was impressed ! All works fine without configuration and there are the same tools than Solaris so it can be a very powerfull system for servers hoping there are not the same vulnerabilities than Solaris ...

[ericturgeon]

Mmm for me ! I install 4 times in my dell dimension and I cant be able for setting solaris 10 to go on internet. long live to FreeBSD the freedom of my pc.

[rwatson@]

OpenSolaris is quite an interesting system. One of the interesting things about it is that, although FreeBSD's adoption of several OpenSolaris technologies has been well-publicized (ZFS, DTrace), OpenSolaris has also quietly been adopting a number of FreeBSD technologies over the last few years. This includes our smbfs implementation, Atheros and other wireless device drivers, 802.11 framework, and a number of other device drivers, including Adaptec storage controller driver. Sounds like both projects are getting a good deal .

[Oko]

It would be interesting to see how this relationship would develop untainted by serious problems which SUN is facing. I honestly do not see either of sides benefiting so much of each other. Solaris has OpenSolaris as a test bed so it doesn't really need FreeBSD.

At this point however it looks like SUN is destined for a slow painful death already seen by most proprietary Unix hardware and software vendors I grow up to know. Porting Solaris to i386 seems like a white flag to me. It is already impossible to buy new workstation based on sparc chip-set and the number of sparc based servers is shrinking. Without sparc, IMHO, SUN is just another vendor of the expensive Wintel junk.
My personal experience in running Open Slowwwwlaris on Wintel hardware is that it has very little to offer to an average desktop user comparing to CentOS (RedHat) for instance. On the contrary SUN has to do some serious catching up when it comes to drivers and proprietary software support. I just do not see how FreeBSD can be of any help?

In late seventies and eighties when BSD was the most popular OS in academia sea of bright students were sharpening their programming skills hacking BSD. Presently I know of handful departments in U.S. who have running BSD machines and I can confess that non of my students for the past 5-8 years have not even heard of BSD and just a few heard for Solaris. So who is going to write drivers or put the pressure on software vendors to release their code for Open Solaris let alone FreeBSD?
Even if I wanted to deploy FreeBSD as a workstation at my department of mathematics MatLab and Maple would be show stoppers. Even assuming that newest versions of this software can be installed on FreeBSD by a very skilled FreeBSD system admin (not really sure that it is still possible) how could I justify running thousands dollars worth of software on unsupported platform?

Could Dr. rwatson comment on this?

Cheers,
OKO

[rwatson@]

It seems fairly clear how FreeBSD helps OpenSolaris, and vice versa: since they are both open source, source code can (and is) moved between the platforms, allowing each to accomplish more than they would alone. Would OpenSolaris have such a capable 802.11 framework without being able to borrow it from FreeBSD? Would FreeBSD have a file system like ZFS without OpenSolaris?

Especially in the current economy, it's easy to subscribe to a doom-and-gloom view of the world, but let's be honest: the computer industry is, and has always been, a highly dynamic place. Twenty years ago, do we think many of the "visionaries" of the industry could predict many of the things that have happened in the last twenty years? It's also easy to ignore the facts on the ground: if you look at the rather extensive world of FreeBSD (and BSD) use generally, there has been a massive increase in FreeBSD deployment around the world. Market share is hard to measure, FreeBSD was and is a strong player in the ISP world, does get heavy use in other service areas, but adoption of FreeBSD in part or in whole by companies like NetApp, Juniper, Apple, Citrix, Cisco, Nokia, Isilon, etc, mean the reach of the platform is incredibly broad. We see significant contributions coming back from these places -- be it work on network stack virtualization, Xen platform support, NFS lock manager support, significant work on network performance, SMP scalability, security audit support, or a variety of other things that have come in in the last few years as a result of these consumers becoming contributors.

I think you're right, though: we need to work harder to increase mindshare, and especially to help universities teach computer science using FreeBSD. For example, can we make teaching operating system courses easier on our platform by providing course material, exercises, etc, and will this let programs that previously couldn't do an OS course now do one?

[gilinko]

I like Opensolaris. It is a very capable operating system, having tried both the 2008.11 release and the latest build(b104). I would however not classify is as a stable distribution just yet, as there is quite a few things left fix before I would replace my current desktop with it(which is linux).

The thing that I see as Opensolaris has in its favor is that it's young. For example the new package system do take advantage in new and improved checks and balances without the need for backwards compatibility(as it's brand new). There are quite a few thing you can change when starting out fresh, and with SUN's history of planning(best viewed in it's backwards compatibility in ABI/API) it is a serious contender in the desktop distribution race. Also things like ZFS has impressed on me very much, as it's one of the major headaches I have with any current system.

Give Opensolaris another year to mature, and it will probably be close to other "desktop distributions" out there like Fedora and Ubuntu.

[danger@]

The last paragraph about providing a course material for universities is a perfect idea. I would really like if my university teached us by following such material, as we had a basic operating systems course that was partly based on FreeBSD (interestingly the machine we were doing our excercises was some 3.x version )

[estrabd]

Originally Posted by rwatson@

snip..

I think you're right, though: we need to work harder to increase mindshare, and especially to help universities teach computer science using FreeBSD. For example, can we make teaching operating system courses easier on our platform by providing course material, exercises, etc, and will this let programs that previously couldn't do an OS course now do one?

Our department supposedly has a FreeBSD network, but I've never seen it. I'm quite the evangelist around my neck of the woods, though.

And I think that providing course material on traditional OS aspects wrt FreeBSD would be extremely helpful - even for those of us who have mostly gotten through their classroom hours.

Brett

[rliegh]

Originally Posted by Oko

My personal experience in running Open Slowwwwlaris on Wintel hardware is that it has very little to offer to an average desktop user comparing to CentOS (RedHat) for instance. On the contrary SUN has to do some serious catching up when it comes to drivers and proprietary software support. I just do not see how FreeBSD can be of any help?

I've only used these in a desktop capacity, which limits my experience. That said I've noticed that Solaris' device driver support appears to have gotten a lot better over the last three or so years.

It feels slow as hades though, and if you're talking as a desktop it doesn't seem worthwhile.

I tried using it in a vm to set up a personal site (again, I'm a desktop user) and gave up and now I'm using FreeBSD for it -because I can go into /usr/ports and the software is there, whereas with Solaris I couldn't get gallery set up properly (gallery is in ports; I'm going to have to tinker with it still, but at least the ports system has set everything else up for me).

It seems like Solaris has been passed-by in terms having software written for it and/or ported to it. That's just my (ameteur) impression, at least.

I'm also worried that the company may not be around this time next year so I don't really want to put a lot of energy into learning how Solaris does things.

[jok3r]

My experience on this is mixed. First some background, I've been a long time user of solaris, and a freebsd zealot, and somewhat dabbled in program writing.

I've had luck installing PcBSD on my laptop because I was looking for a good freebsd desktop OS, which, it is. But I wasnt totally pleased. So I was curious to see what was so great about opensolaris that they would have a link on there Home Page to a link on the FreeBSD forums. Strange, are they calling each other out?

My first experience of open solaris was ordering the CDs online and receiving them in like 2-3 days. I was excited to try it.

I have two laptops from different manufacturers. One has a broken screen and the other has a broken cdrom drive. And I have no money to buy new parts.

So I booted up off the live cd and quickly wanted to install it. Here is the deal it installed beautifully on My Toshiba Satellite 135 with dual-core cpu. Thats the one with the broken screen. The only complaint I have is the power management or whatever that subsytem is blanks the screen after some time and I have to power cycle. But that I can figure out and change. Overall it is reall nice, especially on a dual cpu machine. And its currently running fine with 512 MB ram. One bad thing though is that I believe that it does not see the internal wireless. I am using a pcmcia card netgear adapter for wifi. - :-(

Now the bad news. On the laptop with the broken cdrom, (Sony Vaio) I tried several times to get it to work with the cdrom, it kind of hobbles along at times. But it never finishes and always hangs. So I took out the hard drive and put it in the toshiba and installed it. I put the hard drive back in my Sony Vaio, but before that I did touch /reconfigure . Now my laptop constently freezes up and hangs. The only thing you can do is power cycle. I can say that my opinion on this end is really really bad. On top of that constantly happening, I am now completely locked out of the system. How the heck am I supposed to give a good rating to that. How the hell do you boot up into single user mode so I can edit the password file if my cdrom doesnt work. Looks like the only option I have is going back to freebsd because at least they have a way of installing and at least somewaht working.

So on that note I am going back to FreeBSD and GNUStep.
I wish this post was more positive for OS but it is what it is. Long Live the FreeBSD!
One more thing I wanted to say to Sun. What happend to OpenStep? That was the best desktop environemnet ever. Simple yet elegant! Why dont you use that as the default for OS. Hey I'm just a little guy! I hope you dont get mad at me i still love your products.

Still many kudos to Sun for getting it right on the Toshiba, even if its with an external wifi. I like the desktop and I like the OS. I am looking forward to practicing my corporate sys admin duties on open solaris and building a great website with it.

Peace!

[ctaranotte]

Here is a brief of my contact with OpenSolaris:

Pros: good installer, good hardware recognition (at least of mine), fast Firefox and OpenOffice, decentralized repositories, all the perks of solaris: 64bits kernel, dtrace, zfs...

Cons: limited availability of up-to-date packages (vlc, mplayer, kde), no reference or master repository, no source repository, building/compiling of ports, world & kernel almost impossible (where's the fun?), "/usr/opt" exponentially-growing, still problems with plug & run (bad experience with a new NIC), persistent bugs ( shutdown -p not working ...).

In summary, very promising alternative to desktop linux distros.

[jemate18]

I have just tried OpenSolaris 2008.11. My impression was it is becoming to be a very "linux-like" or should I say "ubuntu-like" OS plus the DTrace and the ZFS. Much of my devices where recognized except for my sound and modem. I installed it in my Laptop Intel Celeron 1.5, 40GB Harddisk, 768MB RAM. Desktop works fine, except that, I think it runs slower than my previous OS installed (Ubuntu 8.10).

Overall, GUI is so nice.....

Is Ian Murdock of the Debian heading the OpenSolaris project? may be this explains why OpenSolaris is slowly transforming in appearance like the GNU/Linux.

jemate18

[trash]

ive found solaris is very fussy on hardware, a massive memory hog of course and very focussed on more business end solutions, not an OS for the home user i think. although saying that a friend has a production machine that broke just by updating it and he was none too pleased, was a real pita to fix as well.

[oliverh]

Originally Posted by trash

ive found solaris is very fussy on hardware, a massive memory hog of course and very focussed on more business end solutions, not an OS for the home user i think. although saying that a friend has a production machine that broke just by updating it and he was none too pleased, was a real pita to fix as well.

Well, that is the purpose of Solaris (and OpenSolaris): business solutions. Many people are confused by the fact of a desktop environment, but that is the "Solaris way" of coping with servers and workstations. Of course you can do whatever you want with it, but do not compare it to the expectations for some consumer desktop.

[trash]

yeah exactly... i hate solaris personally - its fine till it breaks and its impossible to get data off of it afterwards. even to freebsd it seems.

[vermaden]

Originally Posted by trash

yeah exactly... i hate solaris personally - its fine till it breaks and its impossible to get data off of it afterwards. even to freebsd it seems.

Solaris/OpenSolaris allows you to create miniroot image with whole rescue system on it, you may use that for rescue also. Some people use it on embedded platforms like Soekris.

sources:
http://www.lildude.co.uk/howto-creat...am-disk-image/
http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.j...45594&tstart=0
http://blogs.sun.com/setje/entry/pos...oot_solaris_on

[trash]

that wouldnt have been relevant even if i had done that on my system, i have a problem that nobody seems to know how to fix, involving GPT tables corrupted which stops the zfs drive being imported into freebsd. solaris is very flaky - i have a computer on which every operating system in the world works except solaris! bizarrely though - it had solaris running on it for 6 months before it suddenly decided it wouldnt work...i cant understand how that is possible.

[Graaf_van_Vlaanderen]

Before coming to FreeBSD I used OpenSolaris and Solaris 10. I used to work with Solaris 8 and 9 mostly with Cadence IC design tools. I like Solaris 10 mostly for its stability. I have also worked and tested very often OpenSolaris. From my experience it is defintely more stable than any Linux distribution. For instance Solaris flash player is superior to the Linux version. And then there is of course ZFS which allows you to do great thinks with your harddisks.
What I don't like about OpenSolaris and Solaris 10, is the lack of recent software that runs on the OS. That's the main reason why I moved to FreeBSD.

[allbanddxer]

I liked 2009.06 but I really wish it had better support for USB printers... only a few models are supported. And I am not just referring to the limitations of CUPS having a few drivers, I mean the hardware is not recognized...