OpenSolaris 2009.06
Sound and Multimedia
I ran into two main problems with OpenSolaris: flash and sound. I’ll talk about sound more in the problems section below.
YouTube & Flash
When I went to YouTube, I noticed that I needed flash. I tried to do the install via Firefox but that didn’t work (not surprising but I figured I’d try it anyway). I googled to find instructions on how to install it in OpenSolaris:
1.Download the Solaris version of flash player to your machine.
2. Untar that file.
3. Open terminal.
4. #su
5. cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/
6. restart firefox
Once the plug-in was installed, I restarted Firefox and YouTube videos played well but had no sound. More on that below.
Problems & Headaches
The lack of sound was a big problem and I ended up googling to find out a solution to it. I found a helpful blog entry with links to the Open Sound System site where I was able to download the drivers. The blog entry also had a link to a PDF that contained install instructions.
So, after a little bit of work, I was able to get sound working fine on my OpenSolaris system. None of it really should have been necessary though. Sound should work by default as it does for most Linux distros.
One other minor nitpick…I missed having GIMP and OpenOffice.org installed by default. Both were available via Package Manager though. It took just a couple of minutes and I had both of them installed in OpenSolaris.
YouTube videos played well after flash was installed in Firefox.
(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.