Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
This kind of fiddling to set a static IP is fine for people who are used to the command line; indeed, they would not do it any other way. But I doubt that the average GNU/Linux user would welcome this kind of exercise.
There are other desktop tasks that are somewhat onerous; installing a Flash plugin for Firefox has to be done manually. However, if one registers with Sun, then Flash can be obtained from the software repositories.
There is no easy way to play a DVD - compiling VLC from source is the best advice I could find in web forums. One software repository that was providing packages that worked has stopped doing so after receiving legal threats.
The good features in OpenSolaris come from its parent, Solaris. There are new features in networking, storage and virtualisation.
For the individual user, there is a good system of creating system backups, called Time Slider which rang a bell for me - Apple calls its backup tool Time Machine.
Given that it's not aimed at newbies, I can't understand why OpenSolaris did not opt for the KDE desktop rather than GNOME. This is for the simple reason that KDE affords so many more configuration options compared to GNOME which prefers a few options all of which can be guaranteed to work.
In other words, KDE is more tweakable and that's what the more experienced user wants.
And, finally, to the elephant in the room: Oracle. I can't think of a single good reason why the new owner of OpenSolaris would keep the project going. For one, Oracle has got its own open source operating system in the debranded version of Red Hat it pushes as Unbreakable Linux. It is a contributor to the Linux kernel.
Oracle is interested in keeping marketshare and not that much in pushing good technology. It knows how to make the bottomline look good. (Sun, for all its faults, has contributed a lot of really good technology to the world of computing; the only problem has been its stodgy approach to open source.)
On the business side, Oracle will cater to those who run Solaris - that's serious money. But why take on the responsibility of running a community project? Sun was not particularly good at it, Oracle is unlikely to be much better.
And that, in the main, would be the number one reason why possible OpenSolaris users will think twice before taking the plunge.
David Bass
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