Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 09 June 2009 11:19
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
OpenSolaris came out with its third release last week and within a year there seems to have been some pretty good progress.
But with the
acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle earlier this year, the biggest question hanging over OpenSolaris is whether Oracle will decide to continue with the project. I'll come to that later.
The question that always comes up in my mind when I look at OpenSolaris is: whom is this operating system aimed at? Is it just for developers or is it also aimed at users who are somewhat experienced in using graphical desktops based on a UNIX-like system?
I asked Simon Phipps, the chief open source officer at Sun, about this when I
interviewed him in January this year; his
response was: "I'd say that OpenSolaris is aimed squarely at developers who want to have a graphical desktop. Those are the developers who, in the future, will produce the next generation of both client- and server-based OpenSolaris activities. That's not to say that that's what OpenSolaris will be about in three years' time. But where we are at the moment, I'd definitely say it's for web developers, and for the next generation of Unix developers."
That said, someone who has been using GNU/Linux for a while would not find it that difficult to install and use OpenSolaris as I've been doing for the last week.
OpenSolaris comes on a single CD, which is very convenient. It has a neat installation routine, very similar to that of Ubuntu though the installation takes somewhat longer. It is more aesthetically appealing than Ubuntu - Sun obviously understands why blue is a more significant colour than brown when it comes to the human race.
Overall, appearance-wise OpenSolaris is on the right track.
There are some constraints involved in releasing a CD and not a DVD - packges like OpenOffice.org have to be left out. But these can be installed from the software repository, using a package manager which has an intuitive graphic interface.
One cannot expect from OpenSolaris what one gets from GNU/Linux; a project that has been running for a short time cannot be expected to match a much older one in terms of software offerings. With each release, OpenSolaris offers more packages.
There are some snafus. My monitor supports a 1680x1050 resolution but it was configured correctly only the third time I started the system. Prior to that, it was configured with a 1024x768 resolution.
When it comes to connectivity, it is all good for those who use DHCP. But to change to a static IP (and I was
wrong in my assertion last time that this is not possible) takes some doing - the graphical interface provided for managing network interfaces seems to have some problem writing changes to configuration files.
I changed to a static IP by using the command line: edit /etc/nwam/llp for example: e1000g0 static 192.168.61.180/24
Set the default gateway in /etc/defaultrouter: 192.168.61.1 (or whatever your default gateway is)
Enable DNS lookup: cp /etc/nsswitch.dns /etc/nsswitch.conf
Specify IPs of DNS servers in /etc/resolv.conf
Then restart network subsystems: svcadm restart svc:/network/physical:nwam and svcadm restart network/routing-setup
