Exactly one year ago, Sun Microsystems open sourced its flagship operating system Solaris. This article asks the question, where is the OpenSolaris project after one year of operation? It contains views from Sun itself as well as insights from an external contributor to the code.
Looking Back at One Year of OpenSolaris
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Unfortunately I’ve never managed to install neither Solaris 9 & 10 nor OpenSolaris on any of my machines. Installer was simply crashing. Some day I installed under vmware, OpenSolaris distro i found somewhere on the net (Schillix or so). There wasn’t even working GUI. Maybe it will change in the future.
Many people would be willing to help you figure out what’s wrong if you post all relevant information to:
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/forum.jspa?forumID=31
As an OpenSolaris contributor, I can safely say that we want to address any issues that users might have running Solaris or OpenSolaris. Please post at the link above, or subscribe to the linked mailing list and post through email.
I can’t count how many times I’ve had help from SUN engineers or community members.
At the time you probably tried SchilliX, it didn’t have a working GUI, and many of the SUN X11 sources weren’t yet available.
From the sound of things, an OpenSolaris-based distribution such as Nexenta would be more appropriate:
http://www.gnusolaris.org/
Nexenta is a GNU/Solaris operating system.
Well, not all OSs work on all hardware – no big news there.
Perhaps try belinix, which does have a GUI. Schilix does not.
This is great, after all the negativity even the press can see that the Solaris community has been successfully transitioning to an “open” ethos. Many thanks to all those that made it happen.
I hope that after success of OpenSolaris, releasing Java under some kind os free (“as in freedom”) license is only question of time. While I do not use Solaris, I use Java and if Java was open source, I would treat it more seriously while choosing language/platform for my projects. I’m kind of person who cares what kind of license have tools that I use.
http://www.gnusolaris.org/gswiki/Download
You are not allowed to view this page.
WTF?
Houston, we have a problem….
I’m getting that error as well, probably a temporary glitch. Try this URL if you’re looking for a Nexenta download. I think you can get a LiveCD, InstallCD, or VMware image from this mirror.
http://www.genunix.org/distributions/gnusolaris/
BTW, you can get SchilliX and BeleniX OpenSolaris distros from the genunix.org site as well. Happy Solarizing!
Edited 2006-06-13 09:34
ftp://mirror.stanford.edu/pub/mirrors/gnusolaris/isos/
I got a mention in the article, wow. I thoroughly enjoyed myself at Linux World in Sydney and I think that we gave away more media there than we have given away at any trade event and I spoke myself horse talking about Solaris and OpenSolaris (and being dropped into giving a 2 hour presentation on Solaris 10 on Government Day).
I got to meet Renai while Bryan Cantrill was out last year and he’s a really nice guy. Thanks for the mention Renai and James.
I really need to get a 1 year blog done
alan.
there is a great howto in: http://www.blastwave.org/articles/BLS-0050/index.html
And you have the pkgsrc framework to install software:
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/software/packages.html
but at the end, one more OS.
Well, considering that Solaris was there before Linux, it’s not so much one more OS, as it is more of the same.
If you want to run all kind of open source software on Solaris and OpenSolaris you can; including alternate desktops.
http://www.blastwave.org
It doesn’t get much easier than this; download and install then run pkg-get from the command line.
The afore mentioned NetBSD pkgsrc
Sun Freeware on the companion CD you can download. The one thing I like about this CD is you can install KOffice without installing the whole shabang.
I have tested sun solaris 5.10 and 5.11 (snv 27, 37, 38, 39, 40) and I could safely say that there is a huge improvements in hardware detection and support and that this support is happening in a very short time comparing it with linux. It might be 2-3 years behind any linux distro right now, but once you see the quality of it you will appreciate the effort poured into this project.
I had great success to install it on some computers most of them are with motherboards >150$ (based on intel chipsets 865 and 875) and it seems that any cheap motherboard will not succeed.
5.10 was not able to recognize the ethernet controller, but v 5.11.37-40 was.
nvidia drivers were easily installable, unlike linux just with “sh driver”. but the driver stopped working fine after 5.11.38 which happened to be the express version which sun support.
Audigy cards and other fancy cards are not recognizable till 5.11.40.
Currently the version available for download on sun site is version 5.11.snv41.
Software availability for x86 is very very very few. But for sparc platform its quite common.
Be alerted that solaris in general is not intended for desktop or workstation use, though you can use it for these things in a very limited fashion; its main use is for serving. Solaris is very fast once booted (booting is slow)even faster than the fastest linux, and years faster than mac osx but almost like fresh windows install (notice: windows speed is variable and is based on the installed applications).
It’s a shame that sun didn’t try to make a desktop version based on their successful solaris to relief us from windows buggy world, or mac expensive world or linux mess world.
Well done!!
Actually OpenSolaris developers _are_ trying to make OpenSolaris a reasonable desktop base, and there’s no reason it can’t be made on par with Linux-based distributions.
For me though, since it relies on Xorg/GNOME just like Linux does, the best it can be is “on par with Linux”, if you know what I mean.
> Software availability for x86 is very very very few.
> But for sparc platform its quite common.
My impression is here’s very very very very few applications that only run on SPARC.
I agree with you on the impressive progress OpenSolaris has made in one year.
For all the contributors and Sun:
Thank you very much! Keep up the good work.
—
An OpenSolaris community memeber.
I have tested sun solaris 5.10 and 5.11 (snv 27, 37, 38, 39, 40) and I could safely say that there is a huge improvements in hardware detection and support and that this support is happening in a very short time comparing it with linux. It might be 2-3 years behind any linux distro right now, but once you see the quality of it you will appreciate the effort poured into this project.
Quality is a rather subjective term; if Solaris wishes to be compared against something, compare it to FreeBSD, for example – there have been greater strides by the FreeBSD community to making it ‘desktop friendly’ compared to the parlour games that are played over at OpenSolaris.
5.10 was not able to recognize the ethernet controller, but v 5.11.37-40 was.
Ethernet is pretty boring these days, it falls into one of two companies, Broadcom or Intel – both are supported without any problems.
Audigy cards and other fancy cards are not recognizable till 5.11.40.
Currently the version available for download on sun site is version 5.11.snv41.
Pardon? my old PC (before handing it back to my brother) had an Audigy 2, and it was no detected; I had to manually install OpenSound – nothing wrong with that, given that OpenSound is superior to the cobbled POS API which is bundled with OpenSolaris. No offence to Sun, but honestly, the API is horrendous.
Software availability for x86 is very very very few. But for sparc platform its quite common.
I found both lacked software consirably; the aim should be, by Sun, to get opensource software, compiling out of the box, without needing to re-write it.
Be alerted that solaris in general is not intended for desktop or workstation use, though you can use it for these things in a very limited fashion; its main use is for serving.
I wish that Sun employee was around, because according to him, the days of “Solaris only for the server” is long gone – Solaris is for the desktop, workstation and server.
It’s a shame that sun didn’t try to make a desktop version based on their successful solaris to relief us from windows buggy world, or mac expensive world or linux mess world.
Oh pulease, Mac’s are not expensive; considering that I purchase a computer every 3 1/2 4 years, and run them into the ground, it costs me no more than Johnny El Cheapo who insists on purchasing a $499 computer every 2 years because the thing has fallen to pieces or become so unreliable, its barely tolerable.
Solaris could be a great desktop, but the chose the wrong desktop, they allow their engineers to decide the direction, when in all due respects, they don’t have a f*cking clue about designing a product for an end user.
Edited 2006-06-14 04:32
> it seems that any cheap motherboard will not succeed
My motherboard cost <$100 and works fine (except the really cheap onboard NIC, which I’m not certain is a full NIC anyway…). An old PCI NIC I had lying around worked just well with the open source drivers available on the web.
I put together an entire Althon-X2 system for under $700, which has enabled me to work on OpenSolaris development and request 5 code putbacks (3 have been completed so far).
JAOCM – Just Another OpenSolaris community member