OpenSolaris 2009.06
Hardware Requirements & Installation
Hardware Requirements
There are only a couple of requirements listed on the OpenSolaris system requirements page:
Memory: 512MB (768MB recommended)
Disk Space: 3.2GB (7GB or higher recommended)
I opted to give it 10GB of disk space and 1GB of RAM. It ran very well for me with those hardware specs.
Installation Steps
I wasn’t expecting much as far as installing OpenSolaris, but I was pleasantly surprised. Very pleasantly surprised, indeed.
The OpenSolaris installer is extremely easy to use and the install itself takes very little time (about 15 minutes or so). Frankly, I expected the install routine to be at least partly a headache but that wasn’t the case at all. It was better than some of the Linux distros I’ve installed over the years and certainly no worse than installing Windows.
The OpenSolaris install welcome screen.
Choose your preferred disk partitioning.
Select your time zone.
Select your location and language support.
Type you preferred root password and setup your user account.
Confirm the settings and click the Install button to begin the installation.
The install should take about 15 minutes or so.
After the install finishes, you'll need to reboot.
Once the install is complete you can continue using the Live CD desktop or reboot if you want to run the installed version. I prefer the better performance of the installed version so I opted to reboot and leave the Live CD desktop. Not that the Live CD desktop was bad, but having it installed usually results in significant performance gains.
(5 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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(4.83 out of 5)
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.