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OpenSolaris 08.11 first impressions

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I've just installed OpenSolaris 08.11, and I must say, it's really rather cool.

OpenSolaris is the free operating system based on Sun's commercial Solaris OS, and although it's only been going for four or five years, it's already stable, usable and looks good.

I recently installed it on VirtualBox on my Ubuntu box to see what it was like. Installation was a breeze - definitely as easy as installing Ubuntu. Nvidia drivers are already built in, too, so there's no need to install the drivers yourself.

On Virtualbox, itself a Sun product, everything was configured correctly with the exception of the sound card, according to the Device Driver Utility.

 

Virtualbox Guest Additions

In order to get a higher screen resolution than the default 1024x768 you'll need to install the Virtualbox Guest Additions. Simply power down the virtual machine and click Devices > Install Guest Additions.

Then, boot OpenSolaris, fire up a terminal and type su, enter the password, and type cd /media, then hit the tab key and select the VirtualBox CD. 

In the terminal enter pkgadd -d and then hit tab to enter the name of the guest additions pkg file, press yes a couple of times, and you're done.

To resize the screen, simply reboot and grab the corner of the Virtualbox window and make it the size you want.

 

To enter fullscreen mode in Virtualbox, simply hold the right ctrl key and click F. This will maximise the virtual machine to the same resolution as your display, giving you a fullscreen VM without the window. Here's my VM at 1920x1200.

 

To get back to a windowed view, just do ctrl F again. In order to do this, you'll need to allocate at least 10MB of memory to your Virtualbox graphics adapter with the VM powered down.

The desktop

OpenSolaris uses the Gnome desktop, so it feels very much like Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. Therefore, if you're already used to Gnome/Linux, you'll find it easy to tweak and you'll already know your way around. 

I went to Gnome-Look.org and download the Shiki Colors themes and their associated icons and the whole lot installed easily via the Appearance Preferences tool. 

If you only use the core Ubuntu packages, I can't see that you'd really find life in OpenSolaris any different.

Like Ubuntu, Compiz Fusion is supported out-of-the-box. Simply select System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects and select Normal to enable basic compositing, shadows and cool-looking minimise effects and desktop switching. (This doesn't work in VirtualBox as the drivers do not provide 3D support). 

 

Packages

The bulk of the default applications that ship with Ubuntu are already included in OpenSolaris, and many of the others are available through the OpenSolaris repositories. 

Like Ubuntu, OpenSolaris has an easy-to-use package management system, based around the pkgadd tool. The graphical Package Manager looks and feels like Synaptic, but there are some differences, and it's not quite as easy to use. 

The package names are a little more confusing for a start. So rather than being descriptive, they're based around the internal OpenSolaris name for the package, which makes things a little confusing for the new user. 

The repository is also substantially smaller than Ubuntu's. Third party repositories, though, can be added, and provide plenty of additional applications not provided in the OpenSolaris ones. 

Time slider

Time Slider must be the killer app for OpenSolaris. It's a Time Machine-like automated backup and snapshot tool that uses the underlying ZFS file system. Basically, you just enable Time Slider and get it to take regular snapshots and it will then store changed files. 

 

You can slide the time back to when you had a previous version available and examine the differences or restore it to the desktop, just like TimeMachine.

Click the list view mode and you'll also see some additional restore information which tells you how the version in Time Slider differs from the current version, if at all. 

All very clever stuff, and something that would make an awesome addition to Linux distributions were it available outside the ZFS world. 

Fonts

Some things aren't so great. The fonts are largely good, but some of the web ones are a bit on the dodgy side and pixelate badly, with no signs of the anti-aliasing seen elsewhere on the desktop.

 

Enabling font-hinting via the Fonts tab of the Appearance application doesn't help either, so there are still some tweaks needed here to get OpenSolaris up to the same level as Ubuntu.

Performance

Running inside a Virtualbox virtual machine with 2GB of RAM on a Q9550 Core2Quad, OpenSolaris feels very snappy. Memory usage is higher than Linux, but it certainly doesn't feel sluggish. 

The aim was to test OpenSolaris in a VM and then install it on my new HP Proliant ML115 server, which now has a pair of 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives and 4GB of OCZ Reaper memory. 

Unfortunately, OpenSolaris doesn't like the Nvidia RAID driver in the Proliant, so I may have to do without that, annoyingly. (Update: According to Reddit user dmpk2 hardware RAID is pretty much redundant thanks to RAID-Z, so I'll be investigating that route instead!)

Alternatively, I might stick VMWare ESXi on the Proliant and install OpenSolaris to that as a virtual machine. 

Either way, I can definitely see OpenSolaris becoming part of my desktop/server set up in some shape or form. Not least for Dtrace, which I've yet to have a proper play with. 

Anyway, OpenSolaris 08.11 is definitely well worth a look if you're a serial OS installer.

Published: TechPad.co.uk Friday 2 January 2009, 1:20 pm
Views: 17,956 times
Filed under: OpenSolaris

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