OpenSolaris 2008.11
I installed OpenSolaris 2008.11 on my home computer the other day, and took notes about what I liked and didn’t like.
It detected all of my hardware, and everything worked out of the box. The device driver utility is very nice, and gives you detailed information about which drivers are used to support each piece of hardware.
The installer doesn’t allow you to install into an extended partition; you must use a primary partition. I like to have multiple OS’s on my boot disk, so I would prefer to install it in an extended partition.
The installer allowed me to proceed without setting a root password or creating a normal user account. When I booted the system, the GUI wouldn’t let me login using an empty root password. I had to Alt-Control-Backspace to kill the GUI, then frantically login to the text console and set a password. Every 10 seconds, the GUI would automatically restart. I feel like the installer should require a root password.
The system feels very responsive, the graphics are crisp and quick, and the default theme is pleasing albeit a bit too much like Windows XP. There is a network monitor applet in the system tray that blinks when a network packet is sent or received, which I found to be very distracting.
The package manager is good, but very slow. Unfortunately, there is no vpnc client available, and I was unable to build the program from source.
By default, the system is installed into a ZFS root pool, but I don’t really like how it was setup. The name of the root pool is ‘rpool’, and the base of the filesystem is mounted at rpool/ROOT. This is aesthetically unpleasant.
For some reason, OpenSolaris still uses /export/home and the automounter, instead of just /home. Now that ZFS and NFS are integrated, I fail to see the need for an /export directory.. any dataset can be exported via NFS, why should it have to be mounted under a specific directory?
The splash screen covers up all the boot messages, and I couldn’t make it go away. The first time it booted, it took a long time (probably importing SMF services) but I couldn’t see what was happening.
The default install is very desktop oriented, and there are no developer tools or headers installed.
I tried to reboot from the GUI, and my X session crashed to display a blank white screen. I could type letters and they would appear on the screen, but there was no shell to interpret the commands.
The biggest problem I had was actually with GRUB. When you install OpenSolaris on a system that already has Linux installed, it wipes out your existing GRUB menu and will only allow you to boot into OpenSolaris. I had to jump through hoops in order to get my old GRUB menu back, so when I got it back, I said goodbye to OpenSolaris.
OpenSolaris is getting a lot better, but still has a way to go before I could even use it in a dual-boot setup.