Introduction

I had some extra time while I’ve been working on the MeGUI guide, and thought I’d take a look at Solaris 10 and some of the offshoots of the OpenSolaris ‘movement’.

Now, as a disclaimer: I am not running these OSs natively.  These were installed in VMWare Fusion 1.1.1 and Parallels 3.0.  In fact, I’m still installing Nexenta on Parallels and will review it as I’m installing.  This isn’t an indepth view into the happiness of DTrace and ZFS (which, btw, is worth reviewing) but more into the “can I use it and not throw my computer through a window?”

If you are a Slashdot fan, you know that 2008 has been declared “Year of the Linux Desktop”.  Of course, this should be taken with a grain of salt because every year is the year o’ the Linux Desktop.  My opinion is that Linux is certainly ready and that Microsoft is doing everything they can to help the Linux Desktop spread but that is a different post and I’m not sure I’m ready to let the flames out.

Solaris 10 – 6/10

Solaris 10 was a fairly straight forward install.  With some Linux and Unix background, it took about 45 minutes to get to the desktop.  The problems that I had were very simple: there isn’t a simple way to update everything.  My “The Complete Reference: Solaris 10″ book was not exactly forthcoming on that but it’s a simple problem: Solaris 10 wasn’t crafted to be a desktop OS.  A great server OS, but slightly lacking in the desktop category.

Nexenta Core – 6/10

Now, Nexenta is an attempt to merge Debian/Ubuntu with the underpinnings of Solaris.  There are many good things that could come about because of this: user-friendly goodness combines with Solaris, well, goodness.  The good news is that after install, you are introduced to the BASH.  A couple of tweaks to the sources.list file, an “apt-get install nexenta-gnome”, ~500MB of downloads and a slew of installed packages and I was introduced to the Gnome desktop.

The install was pretty easy.  A couple of passwords, set DHCP on the old ethernet setup page and off we go.  After about 45 minutes

This wasn’t bad.  However, there were some problems.  Internet browser was Firefox (good).  The bad is that it’s version 1.5.0.7 which is a touch “ancient”.  The repositories are still catching up to “recent” and this is one of the biggest drawbacks along with the extra steps needed to install a desktop.  I wish the people the best on this due to the promise it shows, but it still has a ways to go.  I know that this is a developent release meaning it’s the base on which further development can be done, and am anxiously awaiting the next release to see what is next.

BeleniX 0.6.1 – 3/10

This LiveCD was more than interesting: it showed genuine promise!  I threw it into the CD Drive and booted to an XFCE desktop.  Everything looked pretty recent and it was (though sluggish) very useable.  I opened up Firefox and…nothing.  It seems that my network device was not playing nice with BeleniX for some odd reason even though Solaris 10 saw it.

Moving on.

Now, I believe that a good review is based on the OS operating off the hard disk drive.  So, I looked for an icon or program or script on the desktop that would dump what was on the CD to my hard drive.

Couldn’t find it.

So, off to Google and after a few minutes I found the magic command: hdinstaller. This was a pretty easy command: open up the terminal, type in hdinstaller, then wait.

After 1 hour, then reboot.

Upon rebooting, there was the magical screen that says I need to edit entries in grub and the like.  At this point, I’m tired and have this strange urge to throw my perfectly good computer out a window.  Since I don’t want to throw $4,100 through a window I had to stop.

The good news is that the problem should be taken care of in the next release.

Conclusion

There aren’t really that many options out there if you want to try out something Solarish other than Solaris.  I’ve extensive experience with CDE and a touch with the Java Desktop Environment but for people who are looking for alternative OSs, I’m not sure I could recommend any of these.

My recommendations are still Ubuntu and Mac OSX for good alternatives.  Just remember that with any new OS there is a learning curve so be patient.