openSolaris 2008.11 released: very impressive! *PIC*

[vital-analitix]

The newly released openSolaris 2008.11 runs like a charm without having to do anything else than to start the liveCD. Has powermangement and fingerprint recognition working straight of the liveCD too.

On my Z61M the media port is not recognized and I had some trouble with wireless.

The timeLine is a real killer application, already love it.

I have tried running Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 and 8.10 and OpenSuse 11.0 but all three had some serious issues along the line and none wanted to run on both machines.

Give openSolaris a try, I think this is going to be a serious alternative to the other products out there. I am going to continue experimenting and see if I can move my custom windows apps across under "Cross over Linux" (wine) from www.codeweavers.com before even considring installing XP under VirtualBox. VMware has become just too bloated imho. Consider Wirth's law: Software is becoming slower more rapidly than that hardware is becoming faster.

Most painless Linux / open Unix ever installed on a machine with everything working, very pleased here. Machine is running cooler than under XP / Vista, the fan is running just a tad more. Initially I thought it did not switch off and was stuck but that ain't the case, it works flawlessly and perhaps the temp settings are lower than under Windows.



Then from the Ubuntu forum one can get the gnome rebuilding theme "Mac4Lin" and suddenly your openSolaris starts to behave like it is a Mac.



Admin note: Added *PIC* warning since I added an image (9KB) to this thread

[tylerwylie]

Can you post some screenshots? (In the appropriate thread )

[rkawakami]

Downloaded the .ISO, burned it and booted an SXGA+ T23 and I'm able to launch programs and use the ethernet connection off the live CD. Will get around to installing it on a semi-bum hard drive (just to see how it handles any install problems) in a couple of days. All-in-all, not a bad experience so far. Maybe I can transfer some of my programs off the Sun Ultra 5 (Solaris 8 ) at work and do some development work at home...

Update 12/18: The live CD is running fine. I haven't tried using the built-in wireless card (not even sure if it has the IBM combo card or a Broadcom; guess it's time to open it up ). I did run into a disk problem when starting up OpenOffice. It installed fine but when I tried launching Writer it must have hit a couple of the bad sectors on the drive and basically got caught in a loop. I re-partitioned the drive last night in an attempt to isolate the bad section and I'm going to try installing OS again.

Additional 12/18 update: Re-loaded OS into a partition which does not appear to have any problems. I've installed OpenOffice, gcc, gimp, and the AMP package. I have noticed that OS runs a little slow on this 1.13Ghz SXGA+ T23 (2647-9LU) with 1GB of memory. I've done no specific system tuning (assuming that it's even possible) but if one needs a free operating system with Microsoft Office compatibility, then certainly OpenSolaris deserves a good look. I haven't tried connecting to my home's Netgear print server; that's the next step to see how well this system can be used in place of a Windows box.

Another 12/18 edit: During my attempt to upload a photo of my T23 running OS, I discovered that infrared support is non-existent, nor was I able to mount a floppy drive from the File Browser (I had to issue a "volcheck" command). In any event, I ftp'd the following picture up to my site using a terminal window:

http://www.kawakami-ca.com/images/t23_open_solaris.jpg

Sorry for the bad picture but it was taken using my Sony cell phone (thus the attempt to transfer it to the T23 via the IR port).

[rkawakami]

Okay, this post deserves a bump to the thread...

Grabbed a screen capture using the included "Save Screenshot" tool and saved it off using a default name. Opened the .PNG image using gimp and saved the original-sized image (1400x1050) as a .JPG. Scaled the image down to 200x100 and saved that thumbnail version. FTP both files to my web site using the File Browser and not a command line this time. Opened two File Browser windows and simply drag-and-dropped the files from my folder to the FTP site. Results are below:

(click the thumbnail for the 1400x1050, 270KB version)

Oh yeah... all of this was done using an 802.11b connection . I had a problem with the first IBM modem/wireless combo card (no surprise there). Swapped in another card from an X24 and after a couple of attempts at making the connection, typed in my WAP password and was online.

Update 12/19 late PM: Also got the system working with my Netgear print server (PS110) but it took some fiddling. The HP5L worked as soon as I figured out that I need to specify an "LPD" type and not a "Remote LPD". Plugging in the print server's IP address and port numbers (P1 for the HP5L and P2 for the HP1100d) only left the selection of the appropriate printer models/drivers. Both the 5L and 1100 printers were listed in the model selection dropdown box but the 5L is the only one that worked. The 1100's default driver was not able to talk to the printer so I selected the 2200 model instead. That seems to work fine. Now all I need to do is find a way to suppress the job header (banner) page as it's a waste of paper....

[phubai]

I've installed opensolaris on my t42p after thinking about it for some time. I run several operating systems on this machine, I suppose more as a form of entertainment than anything else. There is another learning curve involved, one which I'm just now starting to climb with solaris. After having been through that with various linux distros, I'm a little perplexed at the differences I've found in solaris. I used to use freebsd in conjunction with several linux distros and foumd more similarity than difference, but not so with solaris. I'm having to think/research long and hard on the command line before executing a command. But, that's my fault, and not the os's!
It's a very nice environment that you boot into, and most everything works. For me, wireless, even using wpa, has been marvelous. The only problem being "hidden" wireless networks. I've had to expose my network in order to connect, but once exposed, it works fine, even with wpa. Well wpa 2, not, but wpa 1 is fine. I just changed my router to accept either wpa 1 or wpa 2 and it connect fine to it.
Multi-media is my goal right now. I can't stand using an os that's crippled due to proprietary codecs. I've managed to get most of it working, but quicktime movies are not. I'm making progress...I've got it to the point of crashing firefox every time I launch a quicktime video, so I must be close!
At any rate, this os is worth a look in my opinion. It still needs a lot of refinement, but that will hopefully come. I'm surprised at how well some things work and other, simple things do not. I do notice a slowdown on my machine when compared to most of the other linux's I use.
I'll probably keep working with it, although I'm still not close to being comfortable with it. I don't know how to fix things that are so simply fixed in linux for example and the information is a little lacking as well, but I have to admit, it's much, much better than I expected!
I look forward to reading future posts with your experiences..thanks!

[rkawakami]

Although I've been using Solaris 8 on the Sun workstations for a couple of years, I normally interact with the systems via telnet and a command line. This is how I edit and compile the test programs. The only time I actually work in the Solaris GUI is when I'm running the program which controls the memory tester. And even then, I'll open up a terminal window if I need to delete, rename or move files around, instead of using File Manager. I haven't played with the various Linux distributions beyond booting a Ubuntu live CD a couple of times. As with any UNIX-type OS, you do need to figure out what the syntactical differences are when playing around with the command line .

My hope is that I can get OpenSolaris set up just right for most home office and entertainment uses. Being able to do anything that a normal Windows user could do and not having to drop back into a terminal window means that I could give this system to my wife and kids. As long as I can browse the net, create and print office documents, transfer photos off my CF and SD cards with a PCMCIA adapter, edit them in a graphics program, use USB thumb drives, network with my Windows systems and do those things wirelessly, then OpenSolaris is quite useful to me. So far I've been able to do all of that. The only problems left for me to solve or features that might be missed are DVD playback (seems to be missing a codec) and being able to hibernate the system.

I have found that startup and shutdown times are much slower than a Windows XP box. Also I think I've been seeing some issues with wired-to-wireless or wireless-to-wired connections being seamless. For example, when docking or undocking the system it appears to have some difficulty with maintaining a network connection. I do this all of the time with my XP systems so it's something I expect with any other OS.

[wolfman]

Glad I came across this thread - I've been using Open Solaris 2008.11 on my X61 for the last couple of days. Everything just worked on the live cd - was even able to roam from the wireless to wired and back to wireless without any issues... I was suprised that I had fewer issues staying connected to my router (which is 2 feet away) with Open Solaris than I did with Ubuntu 8.04.1 64 bit which seems to intermittently lose it's connection (although 99% of the time it can re-establish).

Right now researching setting up dual boot with Linux - but has anyone tried to set up separate zones under Open Solaris? One of the things I'd like to do I simulate a tiered development environment without the overhead of running multiple OS's each in a VM (not to mention the resource caps, CPU pinning capabilities which just look too slick).

Overall I'm happy with this distribution - very impressed. Back in the day when I was in college SUN workstations were viewed as the best of the best, feels kind of neat to have that OS running on my favorite hardware, gotta admit!

[madcow]

OpenSolaris is nice.

We have discussed ZFS, Dtrace, and containers that really make OpenSolaris different from Linux and yes Windows.

As for the X61, does suspend work? One of my complaint about opensolaris is boot time. Boot time is not a problem for a server that is up year round.. but on a laptop..it would be nice to get it running in 30 sec or less.

[wolfman]

Sadly no, I am not able to us suspend / resume (yet). It appears that if I add "S3-support enable" to the /etc/power.conf and then run "pfexec /usr/sbin/pmconfig" to test enabling suspend, it does not suspend.

By running a "tail -f /var/adm/messages", I see something referring to "device pci8086,2a02@2(display#0) keeps up device sd@0,0(disk#0), but the latter is not power managed" - so it appears that one of my drivers (at least) does not support suspend.

[madcow]

I'm trying out the LiveCD of the developer release of opensolaris 09-06. It's nice. Ithink it is likely that I will replace Ubuntu with OpenSolaris when they it.

[Aroc]

I'm using it on a Dell notebook that previously had Debian Linux. It seems to work fairly well provided you stick to Sun's list of wifi cards. I also seem to recell suspend/resume didn't work for me either. I didn't try to figure that one out since I honestly don't use suspend. I've been using 2008.11 as my main *nix and it seems to work out just fine.

[madcow]

It's looking good. I'm running the latest built of OpenSolaris 2009-6-live from a USB stick.

Sound works out of the box.
Intel graphic driver work out of the out box.
The mutt key works out of the box. For other keys to work, you have to go to keyboard shortcuts and configure the keys.
Driver utility reports zero driver problem.
Wifi works out of the box.
Compiz 3D desktop works.. by default, cube rotation is not as smooth as on Ubuntu. You need to turn off 3D windows and cube reflection and deformation to make your 3D desktop works smoothly.