“With much anticipation by the OpenSolaris community, last night Sun had released their first developer preview for the binary desktop distribution that we have known over the past couple of months as Project Indiana. Ian Murdock and company are optimistic for this project that will address some of the existing Solaris adoption barriers when it comes to the installation, package management, and familiarization along with revitalizing the user experience. How does this first milestone of Project Indiana, which in fact will be named OpenSolaris, rank when it comes to meeting their objectives? In this review, we have a lot of information and screenshots on this long-awaited OpenSolaris binary distribution.”
Not much of a review…five pages of mostly ads with some text.
I have to agree, in my limited examination of the Developer Preview I found at least one missing man page, no support for JumpStart installations at all, and the new package system is going to take some getting used to (for those of us who have no problems with SVR packaging).
What would be far more interesting to read is a review based on (1) the impressions of an experienced Solaris administrator and (2) the impressions of an experienced Linux administrator and (3) at least two weeks of use instead of this “quickie” article that basically says next to nothing other than what is missing and what didn’t work.
Not only are we getting Linux userland, we’re also getting Linux-style reviews, but that was the goal – to reach the mass, who don’t care JumpStart-type of installation and never RTFM 😉
Edited 2007-11-02 00:26
As it is labeled, this is a developer preview.
I’m hoping folks will save their reviews for the main release next year.
I’m not complaining, this is what I have come to expect of Beta software. I also find it interesting that someone modded me down for my comment.
I think we all know that the Developer Preview is going to be torn to shreads by various people because it is lacking features or doesn’t support specific hardware. At this point I wouldn’t get too upset over it.
” I think we all know that the Developer Preview is going to be torn to shreads by various people because it is lacking features or doesn’t support specific hardware. At this point I wouldn’t get too upset over it.”
Hey, it’s not that bad. 🙂 The demo is quite usable on (what most of you call) outdated hardware, i. e. Celeron 2GHz, 768 MB SDR-SDRAM, ATI Radeon 9000 RV250, all additional hardware components (sound card, SCSI controller etc.) are recognized, even parallel PS printer works, while the overall usage speed is acceptable (just running from the live CD). Of course, if you use Sun hardware on a daily basis, x86 experience may not be that impressive. 🙂
I was pretty impressed. I put the disk in my dell laptop, it booted up in less than a minute, correctly identified my graphics card and native resolution of the monitor, asked which of several wireless access points I wanted to connect to and then connected to the one I chose. All that without me configuring anything.
Lots of linux distros can’t do that and zero BDS’s (no not evenPC-BSD, no driver for my intel wireless card)can.
If the object is ease of install and use for desktop/laptop users, I think Indiana is well on track. Who reads man pages?
>> Who reads man pages?
The literate?
The exacting?
Those who want to learn? Those not afraid of learning? Those that can navigate a computer without needing a mouse or a clickety-clickety interface?
🙂
“Those who want to learn? Those not afraid of learning?”
Those who need to learn, e. g. developers and system administrators. They depend on good documentation because trial & error is not a programming concept. 🙂
“Those that can navigate a computer without needing a mouse or a clickety-clickety interface? “
Geeks? Freaks? Nerds? 🙂
That is awesome. Wireless right out the box!
Solaris Express has actually had wireless support out of the box for at least half a year (for many cards). The interface for managing wireless connections was rather poor, but in some ways still better than say, Win XP (but not in many ways).
There are plenty of nice features in OpenSolaris – multithreaded network stack, drace, zfs, etc …
The single feature that would give the project a massive boost would be a system for binary updates to the base OS, and for the installation (and de-installation) of applications and libraries from repositories (official and otherwise). Something like rpm or apt would be good.
The current packaging system is cryptic (SunWSxlcd, anyone?), slow (doesn’t scale nicely with number of installed packages), and not easy to manage (anyone tried removing and package and handling dependencies?)
This might be a good point to build repository awareness into the system – official core base packages, official add-on packages, 3rd party apps (multimedia, etc) which can’t overwrite the base OS and therefore preserving trust in the core OS.
This is also a good time to sort out the binaries – how many “make”s do you need? /usr/bin/make /usr/ccs/bin/make /usr/xpg4 .. you get the idea.
Have you seen how many full JREs get installed on a busy system? The standard one. Netbeans installs one if you get the bloated package. SunStudio installs its own set of binaries…. including its own make, ar, ctags, emacs!
Edited 2007-11-02 02:59
Behold:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/pkg/
🙂
Quite a few actually for compatibility. Each one of those makes provides compatibility for a different environment. They’re not redundant; they’re there for a reason. Some of them are required for POSIX compliance.
On my old machine, it’s pretty nimble, and the easiest installation EVER. I wish more distros would copy its no-hassle installation. Moreover, you can download the ISO at full speed. Sweet.
I hope Solaris reaches feature parity with Linux on the desktop. The more competition the better. In many aspects Solaris is already better then Linux on the server. It was always well respected in this aspect, although Linux is reaching feature parity on that side too.
OpenSolaris of any flavor is desperately missing drivers on x86 platform. I tried both the Devel OS version and this preview, and in both cases I had to get a 3rd party driver for my basic 5 year old ethernet card (via rhine 2) to get on the net. Now, the good thing is that unlike linux, solaris has stable kernel/driver ABI so I could just copy a precompiled driver, do some commands from the readme.txt and be happy about it (well, it didn’t “stick” between resets but I probably missed something).
I managed to even get net up and running but the experience was less than nice. Even if I skip the driver install (which actually went fine all things considered), I had to first figure out which service out of the 100 to turn off, so I can manually configure my DNS (since evidently their automatic network configure service can’t do it properly, I had no such problems with roaming mode in linux).
After that I was online.
But here are 3 biggest issues I had (both Solaris “distroes” I tried):
1. There’s no “reboot” graphical button. Perhaps this is a gnome-default? But I remember having that option on eg: Arch linux.
2. Shutdown/reboot takes ages. I don’t know why, but it takes about 1-2 minutes to go down. Funny thing is, bootup is actually quite fast (ubuntu comparable on Indiana)
3. The installation was SLOW! When I used the Solaris DVD I tought that you know.. too much data compared to eg: ubuntu. But this is one CD as well and it took ages to copy/extract itself. I hope it’s not a ZFS copy-slowness
Otherwise, I wish opensolaris good luck. While I’m not a big Sun fan (I hate big companies, they always screw with us in the end), I’d love to finally have a STABLE (ABI wise) free (and open) OS without being tied to GNU . (Which I guess indiana will be since it’s aiming for gcc right? God I hate that compiler…)
Edited 2007-11-02 10:04
http://www.blastwave.org/articles/BLS-0061/index.html
This was in the article:
Thankfully, Project Indiana is also Mono-free.
Why? For me, Mono and Java are the same, both projects refer to a development product that is controlled by a single patent-hungry company. You just have to pick your poison, Sun or Microsoft. The main difference is that Mono is a Free environment, while Java is not (albeit it will be). Why do we have all this Mono bashing attitude? Why do we have Java praising attitude?
For the record, I hate them both. 🙂
Because it is what all the cool kids do – and if you don’t bash it, they’ll threaten you with the “I won’t invite you to my birthday party” routine. Considering that Novell, TurboLinux, and a few other vendors have already signed patent agreements – the only customers who should be worried about so-called ‘legality’ are Red Hat customers who are flirting with Mono.
As for Indiana, its lack of Mono is neither a plus or a minus – what I hope is that they at least offer it as an option for those customers/users who might want it. Simply burning the bridge that makes interoperability a little bit easier is simply childishness at best.
Edited 2007-11-02 13:29
The patent agreements don’t cover “clone software”. While the C# implementation aspect of Mono is probably safe because of ECMA, Mono’s WinForms, ADO.NET, Silverlight, etc. technologies that build on top of that are not, as they fall under clone software and are not part of the ECMA standard, which only covers the C# syntax and the CLR. If you build a Mono app using GTK# and third-party .NET stuff like say, NUnit, you should be ok, but companies using Mono to migrate a WinForms-based .NET app to Linux are under as much risk with Red Hat as with Novell — probably moreso with the latter since SUSE users are more under MS’s radar, considering the majority of SUSE licenses are now resold by MS itself.
Edited 2007-11-02 19:38
Clone what? what are yoy going on about; the issue is PATENTS and PATENT sharing agreement which give BOTH sides immunity. You sign an agreement with Microsoft – its open access to ALL of Microsofts patent porfolio. From .NET to their media formats.
Now sure, their code isn’t open, but what hell has clone got to do with the price of fish in Sweden during the winter? the issue isn’t cloning. Cloning isn’t illegal, the issue is that when cloning you’re implementing patented algorithms, given that there are agreements in place, its a non-issue.
Read the patent agreement. It permits the use of Microsoft patents for only certain types of software. It excludes ‘clone’ software. That’s where that language comes from.
Patent grants and licenses are as tricky as copyright licenses. Some are clear and simple: IBM grants a royalty-free license to their RCU patents to all freely licensed software. Royalties may be required for closed software. Sun grants royalty-free license to any Sun patents needed to implement ODF, but only for ODF-related uses.
Microsoft and Novell signed a cross-license deal with terms that aren’t clear and obvious to the outside world, and perhaps not even to Novell. My take on it is that Microsoft infringed on Novell patents, knew they would lose in court, and settled. But in typical Microsoft fashion, they structured the deal to hide the infringement, hide the payment, and to give Microsoft fringe benefits rewarding their infringement. Novell customers won’t be sued for infringing Microsoft patents as long as those patents aren’t used in any software that competes with Microsoft products. Microsoft and Novell get to claim that Mono is open, and it is, until you do anything useful with it. Microsoft didn’t pay Novell royalties, they ‘bought’ copies of Novell support that they can resell.
Microsoft is good at these deals. Remember when Microsoft was going to license video technology from Apple? That deal collapsed, Microsoft came out with their own version, and rumors spread that the code looked very similar to Apple code that Microsoft engineers had been working with. Apple sued, and Microsoft settled out of court. But Microsoft didn’t admit or pay for copyright or patent infringement; they agreed to cross-license unnamed technology and buy Apple stock. They later sold the stock at a profit. Actions that should have been punished ended up being rewarded.
Mono isn’t safe to use until Microsoft (not Novell) steps forward and grants *everyone* a royalty-free license to any patent used in Mono and all Mono-related libraries. That won’t happen.
Much better theme, few enough options in the installer. I only looked at the screenshots so I didn’t saw anything about the package manager, but as long as it gets an official one with source code/patches available I’m all for it.
Now all they need is the KDE4 port, thought current gnome environment _LOOKED_ ok.
I will give it a spin seems like it will be nice. I wonder if it will do codec management and all the niceties the newest linux distros are spoiling us with. It seems like lately I could accidentally install and configure a distro. mono vs java hey here is an idea lets build up something else like python.
Edited 2007-11-03 00:04
I think I will go out and buy some Sun stock first thing on Monday because I have a feeling that Solaris is gonna be big again. Linux and the BSDs are still not gonna go anywhere, but I have a feeling that a lot of enterprises are going to be buying Sun boxes running on Solaris. I think the friendly shell environment and standard GUI tools is what most people wanted from Sun. Don’t know what took them so long.