OpenSolaris 2008.11 – Year of the Laptop?

Ahmed Kamal writes "Is Linux getting too old for you? Are you interested to see what other systems such as OpenSolaris have to offer? OpenSolaris has some great features, such as ZFS and dtrace, which make it a great server OS — but how do you think it will fare on a laptop? Let's take an initial look at the most recent OpenSolaris 2008.11 pre-release on recentish laptop hardware."

Re:"Server" vs "Desktop" OS

[anilg]

Are you a troll or woefully uninformed? VLC, Mplayer, etc run flawlessly on opensolaris (I'm using them on belenix).. and have had no issues whatsoever. look for the packages in the belenix or blastwave's repository.

Re:Why?

[Lord Kano]

I'm not going to name names, because I do not wish to enter the distro jihad, but the distro that I use comes with MP3 codecs.

LK

Get yer torrents!

[Niten]

The server at http://www.genunix.org/ [genunix.org], where this OpenSolaris 2008.11 ISO is hosted, is responding rather slowly right now (indirect Slashdotting?). So I want to point out that if you'd like to download this build and try it for yourself, you can get it as a torrent here [sun.com].

Re:Why?

[jalefkowit]

This [array.org] should fix most of your problems. It got Hardy working great for me on an Eee 1000.

Re:Why?

[marafa]

jihad is an arabic word and i definetly am sure you dont know the meaning of the word nor how to use it.

this has been a public awareness message brought to you by :

Re:Why?

[phyrz]

Not really a troll. Jihad generally translates as 'the struggle'. There are several versions of it.

'Jihad as-sayf' specifically refers to 'the struggle of the sword', or the fight against non-muslims. This meaning is similar to the idea of defending the American Dream, or spreading democracy, except that some Islamic states have no seperation of state and religon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jihad [wikipedia.org]

Re:Why?

[TheRaven64]

The Solaris kernel is very nice - good performance, good scalability, zones, ZFS, dtrace, an incredibly scalable TCP/IP stack, a stable driver ABI, and so on. It's fully supported by OSS (Sun paid 4Front to develop it) and I believe it now has a DRI implementation too. The userspace is a bit archaic - it's classic System V, which makes even a GNU userland look nice.

Or, to turn your question around, what is the compelling reason for choosing Linux over OpenSolaris or, say, PC-BSD, on a laptop?

Re:"Server" vs "Desktop" OS

[TheRaven64]

No, the point is what they are optimised for. For example, a desktop OS will have a scheduler optimised for latency while a server OS will have one optimised for throughput. Other aspects, such as the memory allocation policy, filesystem, networking stack, and so on are all differently optimised for server and desktop use.

Some operating systems try to do both, but they generally do one better than the other.

Re:"Server" vs "Desktop" OS

[quarterbuck]

Forget the eye candy, it should be the kernel that really should matter . Here are my suggestions -- not saying they are how they are, just that thats how it ought to be

On a server OS, the kernel should be optimised to run background applications faster. On a desktop the kernel should drop everything and respond to user requests.

Once you step away from the kernel, the userland services should be similarly different. A server should run services to avoid crashes and losses of data - A server can afford to increase bootup time just to ensure that everything started up correctly. The services also need not expect to be handled carelessly, but should be very careful about data. On a desktop, the services should start fast and can afford a bit of tardiness and lack of perfection. On the other hand they should expect the user to behave randomly (start a service , stop , reboot etc. 5 times in a row) and should be able to handle it

Applications on the other hand are something that the user can always add - the Os should not matter here.

Solaris 10 and GNU stack

[Anonymous Coward]

The userspace is a bit archaic - it's classic System V, which makes even a GNU userland look nice.

Make sure /usr/sfw/bin is in your $PATH first, and you'll get all the GNU tool chain in Solaris 10.

Re:Wow. OpenSolaris is a rough ride.

[caindie]

Would be interested if you elaborated a bit on the problems you have experienced. From your perspective and from your users perspective. This is not a, I'm going to argue with you post, but rather a request for more detail - as what you have to say sounds interesting.

I used opensolaris 2008.05 for a month and stopped as it was too rough round the edges to use day to day. But it got most of my hardware just fine. Only sound was missing and OSS handled that just fine.

I just upgraded to 2008.11 RC1 - snv-101a - and find it a whole different experience. I have one app, which runs on linux only at the moment, and I run that on virtual box, which is a breeze to install and configure in seamless mode after the guest os additions are installed.

Mplayer, with all its codecs, does the video, but is inconvenient compared to totem, which is useless as it has no day to day codecs.

My video card is an old ati 2400HD pro card. Sun and ati don't have a relationship so I use the stock xorg support which works, though my initial login screen always ends up odd no matter how I twiddle xorg.conf. The desktop and gnome come up just fine.

The perl upgrade from 5.6.1 to 5.8.4 broke CPAN and I can't fix it - a problem for me which I have to report and hope will be fixed in the the next RC.

Gnome theme changes don't recognize custom icons. Evolution won't play a wav file when mail arrives; but it does beep.

The system clock is set to zulu by ubuntu and I was unable to set the time within opensolaris after the upgrade.

My permissions from 2008.05 didn't migrate. It was a bit of work to figure out how to set that right.

On the way I got to see suns role based access control in its Gnome user and groups configuration implementation and found it much more accessible then the sel-linux approach.

Openoffice 3 and firefox 3.03 complete my story. Both are fine, though I did tweak the firefox ui through about:config for better font rendering. I think there is freetype issue here.

Other then that it just works and works so well that I'm switching to it for day to day work.

My system is a vanilla desktop system built - and rebuilt - over the years from parts from fry.

PC power and cooling 600 watt power supply
core 2 duo 6550
2 GB kingston ddr-800 ram
ati hd 2400 pro
maxtor ide drive
intel/realtec motherboard hd audio
various usb etc which all work
kds monitor - a problem as xorg doesn't seem to figure out its capabilities correctly
memorex dvd -
broke after 6 months of limited usage - tech support - doesn't - "as there are too many linux versions to support" - so no rma for a broken drive still under warantee - stay away from memorex.

Thats what my hardware looks like.

I connect to the net through a vonage router which acts as a firewall and dhcp server. The modem is a cable modem. I've had no connectivity problems. My phone runs via Vonage VOIP.

Printer is an old hp 3200se which works via cups.

Current versions of Azuereus don't work because it has dependencies on eclipse which opensolaris doesn't support.

I think this will likely continue to be true for a while as eclipse is IBM and netbeans is Sun (opensolaris) and well, Sun and IBM have a disfuntional relationship history.

There is an earlier version of azureus that may work, but I haven't tried that yet.

The linux app that doesn't work on opensolaris and which reqiuires virtual box/ubuntu to run - is an application based/built on mozilla.

In theory it should recompile without problems on opensolaris, but in practice it hasn't.

However, compiling a mozilla app is a little like building emacs - they are separate words unto themselves; and I am not knowledgeable about building mozila apps.

I will contact the developers. In theory I just have configuration problems for the compile - in practice, it may be opensolaris has some work to do on what gets installed in their gcc environment.

So thats how things are working for me.

Time will tell.

Survey of Solaris Installation Guides for Laptops

[wehe]

As far as I can see Opensolaris as well as Solaris is not widely used on portable computers yet. TuxMobil provides a Survey of Solaris, OpenSolaris & NexentaOS Installation Guides for Laptops and Notebooks [tuxmobil.org]. The survey contains links to around 70 installation guides. The overall number of installation guides for Unix operating systems listed at TuxMobil is almost 8,000.

Open Solaris on 3 different laptops and 2 desktops

[opypod]

I've installed Open Solaris on 3 different laptops (hp nc6400, dell inspiron 300m, toshiba u205) and 2 desktops (dell workstation with quad xeon and sun ultra 20) and here's my take: 1) open solaris is a really cool idea and i am happy sun has taken this step forward 2) although it installs really easy, the lack of audio drivers (in particular for standard intel chipset) is upsetting. a tech guy at sun told me they are fixing this in the next release. 3) someone posted that it comes with codecs??? really ... the only way i thought you could play mp3's is to deal with fluendo $$$. i never got mp3's to work. 4) the package manager is REALLY nice, but much much slower than e.g. synaptic. 5) if you're used to linux, some things are really challenging in Open Solaris, for example, devices. In linux, it's easy to find your usb drive (e.g. /dev/sdb2) and mount from command line. pardon my general inexperience with solaris, but i found it impossible to sort through the many many many virtual dev that OS uses. long story short ... my quick and easy linux tricks don't work in solaris which make trouble shooting VERY difficult. 5) wireless was hit or miss ... on some laptops, no problem at all. on others - nightmare (i guess this is the case for linux too) 6) acpi (on laptops) is flaky, but same for linux sometimes too. PROS) i like that sun is trying to give us a complete open source world: open solaris, open office, open jdk, mysql, netbeans, etc.. THAT in itself is so cool: to have one company trying to give you the whole integrated package. all these things together make for a really great laptop/desktop CONS) your linux skills might not apply when troubleshooting and given x hours of free time in the day, you may not want to dive into solaris ... also, sun's customer support (even with my free trial of ultra 20) is horrible. be prepared to be tossed around to dozen's of customer support people, each of whom seem to know less than you do. FINALWORD) give it a whirly-ding. it's a great experience and i think the more people that try/use/comment/fix open solaris, the better it will become. i just wish sun would have thought of open sourcing solaris 10 years ago when it could have grown up to be what linux is right now.

Re:Why?

[ToasterMonkey]

I was interested in trying OpenSolaris for this very reason, since I wanted to see e.g. if I could build Makefiles that worked with GNU make, Sun make and BSD make, and that type of stuff. But to my surprise the userland tools I tried were all GNU.

This is one of the big areas where OpenSolaris differs from Solaris. There are many more GNU utilities installed by default and in your PATH, but I don't believe any of the versions from Solaris have disappeared, just moved elsewhere.