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One month living with OpenSolaris

I take a look back at my experiences a month since switching from Ubuntu 8.10 to OpenSolaris 2008.11 on my Dell XPS M1330 notebook.

Having been impressed with OpenSolaris 2008.11 after installing it as a virtual machine on my Q9550-based Ubuntu workstation, I decided to take the plunge and get it up and running on my new Dell XPS M1330 laptop.

The XPS M1330 was previously running Ubuntu 8.10 very well – everything worked as it did on Windows – but I wanted to try and see what OpenSolaris was like as a combined multimedia desktop and portable web development OS, and have a better play around with the excellent TimeSlider snapshot backup application.

OpenSolaris 2008.11 installs from a live CD, just as most Linux distributions do, which gives you a chance to see what it's like prior to installation and to check that it's compatible with your hardware.

The installation is as easy, if not easier than Ubuntu's, and there's a useful Driver Utility to show you which device drivers have been picked up by OpenSolaris to give you some idea of whether the installation is going to be successful.

I was expecting OpenSolaris to have some problems with the Wifi card in the XPS, but to my surprise, it configured pretty much everything out of the box. A few things don't work: the horizontal and vertical scroll features of my trackpad don't work (they did in Ubuntu), and neither do the nifty touch sensitive buttons for controlling the volume and playing music. However, all of the important stuff was performing flawlessly.

Compiz
The Compiz settings on OpenSolaris appear to be more feature rich than the basic ones provided in the default install of Ubuntu. There are lots of nicely configured tricks in each of the Compiz Visual Effects settings, including a handy Custom one, which allows you to manually tweak the configuration without the need to install any additional software.

The desktop feels very snappy and everything works perfectly, including the Nvidia drivers and font-hinting, which can be set-up with a single mouse click. Expo, Compiz's Expose-like application, is set up and looks amazing. As does the application switching tool, which is similar to the effect seen on Vista. I really can't fault the way Compiz works under OpenSolaris. It's very stable, and it looks very, very nice.

Base applications
The base installation of OpenSolaris includes similar applications to Ubuntu. The Evolution email client is replaced with Mozilla Thunderbird; Synaptic is replaced with the Solaris Package Manager; GIMP isn't installed out of the box, and neither is OpenOffice.

OpenSolaris also includes in its repositories quite a few applications that aren't available (or aren't easily available) in Ubuntu or other Linux distributions. The NetBeans IDE is great.

Configuration tools
One neat thing that I wasn't expecting is the addition of GUI tools for configuring various bits of server software. For example, when I installed Apache 2.2 from the repository, it also installed a rather good Java-based GUI tool for creating virtual hosts and setting the root directory, which made moving the document root of my development server to my home directory very easy.

Repositories
Like Ubuntu, OpenSolaris applications can be downloaded from software repositories. The base install is set up to use the opensolaris.org repository, but there are a few others that you can add if you want to install additional applications. I had some teething troubles here, which turned out to be because the Blastwave repository I'd tried using was down, and the LifeWithSolaris one was issued with a take-down notice...

According to the chatter on the OpenSolaris discussion lists, some people were a bit narked that the LifeWithSolaris repositories disappeared, as they really made it easier for users to get the multimedia side of things (video codecs, DVD playback, etc) up and running very easily. It's these areas I'm still trying to configure now, and VLC refuses to install, so no video playback as yet.

Installing applications from the repository is pretty simple, but it seems to take longer than in Ubuntu and the size of the downloads for many of the things I've installed have been pretty massive. Installing phpMyAdmin and phpSysInfo results in an enormous 248MB download – the source code for these projects is well under 30MB, so there are obviously shedloads of dependencies that aren't included in the base install of OpenSolaris.

Download time aside, the repositories worked well, however, I've been completely unable to get GFTP to install. No error message was given either...

Boot and shutdown
The boot process doesn't appear anywhere near as quick as Ubuntu, and it takes well over a minute to get to the desktop. I guess that's unsurprising, as whereas Ubuntu has been specifically tweaked for laptop usability, I'd be surprised whether OpenSolaris has.

Shutdown on my machine is even worse. It takes quite a long time after pressing the Shutdown button for the machine to actually appear to start shutting itself down. The screen then goes white, and some text appears on the screen and the machine powers down. This takes a good couple of minutes, which is not so great for laptop use.

Multimedia performance
One thing I did like was the choice of Rhythmbox as the default media player. This worked well for me, and I also managed to install the excellent Songbird application from the repositories.

Video playback was a different kettle of fish entirely. Totem is installed, but there's something of a lack of codecs, so many videos in my collection won't play. This is much less user friendly than the Totem application on Ubuntu, which detects the video format and suggests codecs to download.

Community
I managed to find a few good hints and tips by browsing the OpenSolaris.com forums. The OpenSolaris community is clearly miniscule compared to Ubuntu's, so some of the questions do seem to go unanswered for quite a while, which has gone down badly with some less understanding users. The documentation was very good though, I thought, and I definitely picked up some handy stuff both there and on the forums, whether they're lively or not.

The outcome...
In terms of stability OpenSolaris has been great. With the exception of the possible bugs in the shutdown process, and the odd repository issue, it's performed flawlessly. I tend to use my laptop for both web development and office productivity stuff, which it's perfect for out of the box.

However, I also use it to watch films and listen to music, and in those areas it does have some drawbacks, because the multimedia side of things are trickier to configure – there definitely appears to be a lack of free codecs, making it poorer than Ubuntu in this area.

ZFS and TimeSlider are outstanding, and the whole OS is really polished. If it weren't for the multimedia issues I'd be sticking with it, but as I want my machine to perform lots of roles, I'm going to go back to Ubuntu. However, I'm certainly going to put OpenSolaris on my file server, where I'm sure it will perform really well.