OpenSolaris 2008.05 Indiana "Review"

Nowadays, when the average person hears "UNIX," they immediately think about GNU/Linux, which in the past several years has tried to make its place in the mainstream operating system world. Distributions such as Ubuntu (which I personally do not prefer), OpenSuse, and Fedora are steadily becoming alternatives to expensive Macs and bloated Vistas. (Note that GNU/Linux is not actually UNIX, only UNIX-like.)

The Solaris flavor of UNIX is based on the original System V UNIX from way-back-when, and before that was based off of BSD. Developed by Sun (You may recognize the name from installing Java.), Solaris has been trusted on many Sparc workstations and servers.

For the most part, Solaris has been closed-source, but since 2005 code has been released in parts. In March of last year, Ian Murdock, famous for Debian, was announced to head the OpenSolaris Indiana project, a completely open source Solaris. Indiana (2008.05) is the very first Solaris of its kind.

Sun has also decided to get with the trend of releasing live CDs, making the transition a little bit easier. They also offer a free disk if you forgot to buy new blank CDs or if you're like me and your burner doesn't work.

At first glance, everything seems very polished and nice, something you may not expect from anything other than the mainstream Linux distro. Grub2 loads right up with an option for OpenSolaris, OS in text mode, or to boot from the first hard drive. The boot up felt about the same to a tiny bit longer than your average Linux, with a selection of keyboard layouts and languages. Being a live CD, it runs slower than if it were installed on your system. Sadly, this is a bit slower than normal.

The installation has fewer menus, but seems to take a little longer to install. Usually I like to inspect every package that is installed, but not option for that is present. You simply pick the partition, set the root password, add a user, and that's basically it. For KDE users, Gnome is installed by default, and as far as I know, is the only desktop environment present on the CD.

After installation and the reboot, you're presented with a smooth, blue OpenSolaris theme for grub and Gnome. Solaris has always had a different theme than normal (the orange Java button comes to mind), and it has changed for OpenSolaris to the bubble-looking thing that Sun has been using since Indiana was announced.

Overall, the system seems to run a bit slower than the Linux systems that I am accustomed to. As for wireless, the wpi drivers for the Intel 3945ABG work immediately and without configuration, but OpenSolaris uses nwam to manage network connections. Nwam hardly requires any user input, except to pick an access point. It can be disabled, however, the backend scripts for the default network manager fail to work for me. Also, I normally get a weak signal from where I usually am, but on OpenSolaris I get absolutely no signal at all.

By now, most UNIX (or UNIX-like) users are accustomed to package managers for their software and operating systems. Debian-based have apt, Fedora has yum, Gentoo has portage, FreeBSD has ports, and Slackware has...packages. OpenSolaris has IPS (Image Packaging System). Basically, IPS is like mixing a repo, an iso image, and something like SourceForge. In the end, it allows easier distribution of software. Since release, there are only three large ISP repos that I know of, and for some reason one of them causes my package manager to perform an eternal dependancy check.

As much as I appear to be complaining about OpenSolaris, it's actually pretty nice. For the casual Linux user, it's quite a learning curve. BSD experience helps, but it's still very different if you haven't touched Solaris before. It's almost like learning Linux all over again from DOS, and about 50% harder. For one, the directory structure is very different, but that's only because there are many preferences among Solaris users, such as never touching /usr, everything goes in directory Foo, etc. Hopefully, with the involvement of Murdock, and many open source programmers, Solaris will become as familiar as Linux is today.

Also, Sun is hosting a contest for student reviewers of OpenSolaris. So if you're a student and have tried it already (if not give it a try), the link is http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/reviews/studentzone/index.jsp

Raytracer

I'm bored, the school year is ending, and I need something to code.
How about a raytracer. Aww yea.