Competition from Solaris?

Well, it's certainly interesting, here's a brief rundown of my first experiences as a seasoned Linux user. (i.e. don't try this at home if you're a Windows user!)

First up, the CD wouldn't load on my test box, it failed with "kernel too big to fit in memory", albeit the error was a little more cryptic. However after resetting the box's BIOS back to defaults (I'm guessing it didn't like having memory holes on, or it didn't like having the BIOS cachable) it loaded up and presented an install icon. (looks pretty too!)

It did strike me with it's blue Gnome theme .. "Hmm, looks like Fedora!" ..

After a relatively lengthy installation (35 mins?) it finally rebooted and tried to load the CD again, which is indicative of my experience so far - generally it works and looks good, but attention to details simply isn't there. [it didn't push out the CD OR warn me to take it out]

Note also the initial boot process requires the user to select the keyboard type etc using a console / text based menu which looks rather like SCO Unix did back in 1990.

Anyway, up and running, click on the package manager and something akin to Ubuntu's synaptic appears and I must say it looks a little nicer, cleaner lines etc. Seems to work well enough however it does have a nasty habit (as do a few things) of going away to think about things without any sort of visual warning, so it does sometimes make you think it might have crashed .. then it comes back to life and carries on.

Open office installed Ok, so then I went back to my desk assuming like an idiot that I could log in with NX, talk about an oversight! I sort of get the impression this is supposed to be a developer preview, in which case no self respecting developer is going to replace his desktop with the test machine, nor is he likely to have the time to sit at another desk. Solution NX, and why not, it's free!

Of course NoMachine do a Sparc version, but this isn't going to run on OpenSolaris, different architecture obviously, so .. FreeNX.. ?

I found a working archive here which after a little fiddling around did work for me, although initially "ldd nxnode" was reporting lots of "not founds" which turned out to be in /usr/NX/lib, what confused me is that after a few minutes of messing around, the system seemed to find them all by itself. After reading the ZFS documentation (which looks great, as does ZFS itself) it does give the poor Linux user a feeling that he's trampling around in a haunted house ...

So, performance .. differences .. well, on my test machine which is a 2.8G Dual Core P4 with 1G ram and a 100Mb network card, performance is good and NX performance is excellent .. (he says with a wry smile as the password box pops up and with an error reporting the screensaver failed to start) and looks are pretty good, although there are lots of tiny quirks, display glitches etc. [which I'm not attributing to NX]

Range of applications is severely limited and I suspect a number of my favorites aren't going to compile because of a lack of libraries.

From a command line perspective, all is relatively familiar. Just bear in mind there is no "top" (use 'prstat') and start with zfs list and zpool list if you want to do anything with filesystems or storage..

I would strongly recommend reading up on zfs first tho' , and if you want "ps ax" try "ps -Al" to get you going (which is going to break lots of script based software) ..

Summary

Although OpenSolaris has some very nice server based options such as ZFS, it's not there on the desktop for the moment and it's missing critical mass in terms of relatively basic application support . In terms of things like differences in ps, lack of top/free, minor annoyances like the DEL key doesn't work from the bash command line editor, etc.. (Obviously I say this from the point of view of a Linux user considering OpenSolaris as a potential alternative) 

The other issue is that it's lagging, I noticed in particular it's running Firefox version 2,  Gnome 2.2, only supports Xen 3.1 and is showing OpenOffice 2.4. I guess the latter is "ok" except that OpenOffice is a Sun product and they've just launched V3 I was sort of hoping it might've made it into their new baby fairly quickly... might be 6-12 months before we see it based on the lag in the rest of the system.

Not bad for a first attempt, although given Sun's apparent size and the relatively minor scale of the missing polish a little disappointing and maybe a month or two too early for the cover disk of a magazine .. ?

Definitely one to watch, if they can crack some of the compatibility issues the zfs stuff is certainly something that's caught my eye.