Occasionally I get an interesting, off-the-beaten-path suggestion on the Request A Review page. This time around somebody suggested doing a review of OpenSolaris. Why do a review of OpenSolaris? Well why the heck not? It’s always fun to check out a different kind of desktop operating system. Sometimes you can find an unexpected jewel when you least expect it. Is OpenSolaris a jewel? I’ll try to answer that question in this review.
If you aren’t familiar with OpenSolaris, here’s a little background from Wikipedia:
OpenSolaris is an open source operating system based on Solaris created by Sun Microsystems, now a part of Oracle Corporation. It is also the name of the project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around it.
OpenSolaris is derived from the Unix System V Release 4 codebase, with significant modifications made by Sun since it bought the rights to that code in 1994. It is the only open source System V derivative available. Open sourced components are snapshots of the latest Solaris release under development. Sun has announced that future versions of its commercial Solaris operating system will be based on technology from the OpenSolaris project.
What’s New In This Release
Here’s a sample of the new stuff in OpenSolaris 2009.06:
Time Slider Snapshot Management (take snapshots of your home directory)
Codeina (install additional media plug-ins)
Elisa (free and open source media center)
Time Tracker (panel application that lets you keep track of your time)
IPS Improvements (reduction in memory use, fat packages)
Package Manager Improvements (better start-up performance and user experience)
Better Hardware Support (SPARC, Nehalem)
You can use OpenSolaris as a Live CD or you can install it to your disk.
(5 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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Pretty bland review. You missed out any of the features unique to Solaris, such as ZFS (and its Time Slider GUI), what boot environments actually are and why they’re useful (rather than a brief mention in passing), dtrace, zones etc.
Incidentally, the best way to install Flash is via the Extras repository at http://pkg.sun.com (which contains this and a bunch of other stuff that isn’t freely-distributable), not by downloading tarballs.
i agree with Numpty, being a desktop user does not automatically mean, i am only interested in music players, email clients and games.
sure, you need this games and stuff to attract users, but opensolaris with its strong engeneering background should be reviewed from the view of a techician.
What i missed: something about the virtualisation posibilities, for example VirtualBox, wich works flawless on opensolaris.
The next OpenSolaris release is (hopefully) just around the corner. Since the 2009.06 release they’ve integrated the OSS drivers for better sound compatibility and enhanced much of the existing features.
Hardware support is lacking compared to Linux, but that’s changing at a decent rate.
Where OpenSolaris will shine, is as a server OS. Solaris has always been one of the best versions of Unix out there, bar none. It is stable, has one of the very best journaling file systems (ZFS), comes with superb monitoring tools (DTRACE, etc) and is super stable and scalable.
I worry about what will happen to Solaris and Open Solaris with the Oracle take over. From what I read, Oracle does not seem to have the affection for Solaris that Sun had.
This is really sad, actually. Some of the Unixes deserve to die, and Linux is definitely the future. However, both Solaris and AIX have been running the back end Enterprises for years! Stability, Security, and Scalability have not been issues with either of these excellent Unix OSes for a decade!
I wonder what would have happened if Sun had seriously pursued Solaris on x86 back in 2000 and had made the entry price cheap, or better, created Open Solaris back then? I know Sun was making serious money on Solaris/SPARC back then, but if they had an eye out for the future, we may not even be having the Linux verses Unix discussion at all.