This Old Blog

I'm on record (see " OpenSolaris is here to stay " from May 2008) as saying that OpenSolaris was here to stay, and even thrive, as an open alternative to Linux. Unfortunately, some two years later, it now looks like history is ready to prove me wrong. I really wanted OpenSolaris to succeed. Up until 2007 I was a pretty happy proponent of Linux, preaching its benefits and the joy of using various distributions such as openSUSE, Ubuntu, and Mandriva. But some time around the middle to latter part of 2007, Linux's overall quality began to decline; updates to distributions released in the early part of 2007 (openSUSE 10.2, Ubuntu 7.04) were suffering breakages in various packages and the loss of certain capabilities. I became less enchanted with my distributions of choice. Then I stumbled onto OpenSolaris, specifically the Project Indiana Developer Preview, which I wrote about . Later in 2007 I ran a mini-comparison between openSUSE 10.3, Ubuntu 7.10, Fedora 8, and th...

I was asked by Beranger in a comment to the last post if OpenSolaris 2009.06 would detect and automount USB drives. Yes, it will. See the screenshot to the right. This test was conducted using the LiveCD only. The USB thumb drive I tested this with was an older SanDisk cruzer micro 1GB. It was formated as FAT 32. When plugged in the desktop mounted the thumb drive fairly quickly, then popped up two dialogs; one informing me I had installed an Audio CD and asking what application I wanted to launch, and the other informing me that it contained "software intended to be run automatically. Would you like to run it?" I found the second dialog rather interesting since the application it detected was a Windows executable. This particular USB drive still contains LaunchU3.exe. I've changed the Windows registry on my machines to essentially block this feature and thus ignore it. I find it interesting that OpenSolaris still detects the "fingerprints" of the automatic ex...

I downloaded and booted the LiveCD version of OpenSolaris 2009.6, more for consistency than anything else I suppose. Europa booted into the OpenSolaris graphical desktop at 1024 by 768, which is too low for the card and the monitor. When I changed the resolution to 1280 x 1024, the screen resized fine but the upper and lower Gnome panels didn't move to fit the new screen size (check screen capture left). Which brings up another nit. Normally on a Gnome desktop hitting PrintScreen will bring up the screenshot save applet. This desktop doesn't do that. Fortunately you can bring it up via the main menu (Applications | Graphics | Save Screenshot). Such are the minor nits to be found after five minutes of very casual use. Oh well. Is this version fit to challenge Linux? That depends on who you are. If you're a Windows-Hater/Linux-Lover then it won't satisfy you. Not because if any specific inferiority of the system, but simply because ItsNotLinux(tm). At the other extreme, i...

I've never gotten angrier after reading a blog post like I did after read Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols' post " OpenSolaris Arrives just to Die ". The crux of sjvn's argument is: Still, all that said, I think OpenSolaris could survive, and possibly even thrive, if it wasn’t for one sad, simple fact. Sun may not have the IP (intellectual property) rights to open-source Solaris in the first place .... In the recently concluded Novell/SCO trail , however, Novell’s attorney’s focused a great deal on the Sun’s deal with SCO. You don’t need to read between the lines to see that Novell may be having second-thoughts about letting Sun’s assertion that it had the rights to open-source Novell’s Unix code in OpenSolaris .... There's further 'facts' sjvn pulls out to back up his argument that Sun is in serious trouble because it really didn't have the right to open source its version of Unix in OpenSolaris. And that Sun it going to be beholden to Novell, and that N...

I'm subscribed to indiana-discuss@opensolaris.org. This came across the wires earlier this morning. It's a report about an installfest that was conducted in Bejing on Tuesday, May 6th. subject: [indiana-discuss] Some Thoughts After An Installfest Event Today in Beijing we organized an installfest event with OpenSolaris 2008.05. The machines we used are Lenovo E680A, which has an intel core-duo 1.73 GHz CPU with 1 GB memory. This was a full-day event -- we provided 45 laptops, which attracted more than 100 people during the whole event. They were instructed to install OpenSolaris 2008.05 from CD, and install some packages via IPS and traditional method. Some engineers and interns from Sun were there to provide onsite. Most of the attendees had but very little experience with Solaris previously, some of them used Linux for various periods before. Some feedbacks: Installation was very slow. We used to install SXDE onto the same machine before, which took us less than 45 minutes t...

OpenSolaris 2008.5 is available as an ISO download ( and here as a torrent ). It's shipping with the Gnome 2.20.2 desktop, so it will behave quite comfortably for those who are familiar with Ubuntu 7.10, openSUSE 10.3, and other recent distributions from the last six months. I've booted the live CD on europa, and so far everything Just Works. When OpenSolaris first starts to boot you're presented with a nice Grub screen with three selections; select OpenSolaris (the default), memtest, and boot from the local hard drive. After selecting or waiting for the timeout for OpenSolaris, the next screen is a crude text-based menu to select your keyboard and language. And when I say crude I mean crude. It's defaulted to select English for the keyboard and the language, so a couple of returns (for me) and you're booting into Solaris proper. After the keyboard/language selection it takes a good 30 seconds on europa before the desktop finally appears. When it finally shows up, ...

With the final release of Fedora 8 last Thursday, I decided to perform a simple experiment with four distributions. I'd boot them on my two Gateway notebooks. I didn't want to try anything fancy or complicated. I just wanted to see if they'd boot up to their default graphical desktop. The four distributions I tried were Fedora 8, Ubuntu 7.10, openSUSE 10.3, and Indiana (Open Solaris) Developer Preview. All of the Linux distributions were final releases. The following table compares the notebook models I used and their respective graphics subsystems. Notebook Model Grahics Subsystem Purchase Date Gateway M680 AMD/ATI Mobility Radeon X700 June 2005 Gateway M685 nVidia GeForce Go 7800 June 2006 Note that these notebooks are between 1.5 and 2.5 years old. So these are not bleeding-edge machines, but they're quite capable none-the-less. Both machines currently dual-boot between Windows XP and openSUSE 10.2. And to cut to the chase the following table shows the results of att...

Well, never let it be said I can't be easily entranced by the New and Shiny. Especially if it's free. Which is why I downloaded the Project Indiana Developer Preview ISO ("Indiana") and then preceded to boot it on several machines within reach. This is just my initial impression of an OpenSolaris derivative, and can in no way be construed as a review. If you need something deeper then you can mosey over to Phoronix and read what they have to say about Indiana. You have been warned. Europa Of course the first machine I attempted to boot Indiana was poor suffering europa. It gets poked and prodded and pulled apart at the drop of a hat. Booting Indiana on it was no exception. This version of OpenSolaris booted the fastest of any I've booted to date. That's actually a good thing. Other derivations have taken longer to too long to boot into a graphical desktop. What worked: Oddly enough, the screen resolution. Using the ATI X1950 Pro video card, Indiana put up a...

I can never leave anything alone, especially if it's an OS I've not played with before. I ordered a free copy of Sun's Open Solaris Starter Kit mid-May, and took some time this evening to boot its three included distributions; Nexenta, Belenix, and Schillix. There are better reviews of these distributions if you google for them ( especially Nexenta ), so there's nothing special or new I can disclose. I can, however, provide an additional perspective you may find useful. The three distributions come on a single DVD, and when the DVD boots you're presented with a GRUB screen that allows you to pick between the three distributions, as well as variations within each. For example, there are six different ways to boot Nexenta. I chose the 32-bit version. I tried to boot all three, sticking with Nexenta for further reviewing because it operated the best of the three. The system Nexenta booted on was europa. This is the machine that runs Open Suse 10.2. It took quite some ...