# How do you feel about OpenSolaris?



## ikbendeman (Mar 5, 2010)

I'm interested to know what other FreeBSD users think and feel about OpenSolaris, it's infrastructure, software support, anything? I like it, though its a bit immature on the software side and I hate its devfs implementation. Oh, and how do you guys feel about its community?


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## BrainDamage (Mar 5, 2010)

I had used it for over two years. But since the acquisition of Sun by Oracle is completed I give FreeBSD a chance.
Opensolaris features are really cool, so I planned to migrate our production servers to Opensolaris (Webservers, Mailservers, Proxyservers for about 5000 users). I wanted to get rid of Fat-Penguin-OS because of its buggy kernel.
But since the acquisition Oracles strategy wasn't really clear to me. I decided to make a break and so I switched to FreeBSD, because I was looking for another rock-solid UNIX. I like it, it works an has a great ports-collection.


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## ikbendeman (Mar 5, 2010)

is there any kind of equivelant to the freebsd handbook in the opensolaris world that you know of?


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## BrainDamage (Mar 5, 2010)

This is a very good ressource:

http://wikis.sun.com/display/OpenSolarisInfo200906/Home


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## fronclynne (Mar 6, 2010)

The hardware support doesn't seem to be terribly broad, and you have to jump through hoops to not use gnome, but once you learn some of the command-line tools it's a pretty spiffy OS.

I put NetBSD's pkgsrc on, and while you have to spend some time fiddling with compilers and libraries, a couple of things will eventually build.


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## Oko (Mar 6, 2010)

ikbendeman said:
			
		

> is there any kind of equivelant to the freebsd handbook in the opensolaris world that you know of?



SUN microsystems has fantastic documentation. Obviously you have never visited SUN's web-site.



			
				fronclynne said:
			
		

> The hardware support doesn't seem to be terribly broad, and you have to jump through hoops to not use gnome, but once you learn some of the command-line tools it's a pretty spiffy OS.


Hardware support for what? For win modems and shitty i386 junk. Common, Solaris was written for Sparc. OpenSolaris started as a port to i386. Far what is written has no competition.Note! It is not written for desktop users that is for sure. It is not even written for firewall or embedded hardware




			
				fronclynne said:
			
		

> I put NetBSD's pkgsrc on, and while you have to spend some time fiddling with compilers and libraries, a couple of things will eventually build.



Oh, please. It took developers two years to fix pkgsrc on DragonFly which uses pkgsrc as 
default packaging system. Even if pkgsrc works on OpenSolaris 10 times better than on OpenBSD it is plain useless. That is from personal experience. 

Usually when you try to be good for everyone you are good for nobody. pkgsrc has way too many cool undocumented features on NetBSD which should be documented first before doing anything.


I am not sure about the future of OpenSolaris in spite of recent statements of Oracle 
executives but for HPC, large data centers, and similar roles has no equals.


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## gpatrick (Mar 6, 2010)

I used OpenSolaris since its first release, up to build 129.  However when I went to build 130 I had problems and if you follow the OpenSolaris forums you'll notice there are MANY problems, mostly from builds 128 and forward. 

The next release 2010.03 which is to be based on build 134 is due at the end of the month, which is quite puzzling really.  Sure, the release won't be b134 but will be maybe 134a or 134b, but with so many problems even in the current b133 I question how they possibly can think all of the problems will be resolved so quickly since they've been around since b128?

I currenty am running VirtualBox OSE on FreeBSD 8.0p2 and the performance trumps running VirtualBox on OpenSolaris!  Currently I have 6 VM's (OpenBSD) and the load average hasn't been over .50, while on OpenSolaris 6 VM's would have been pushing the capabilities of the machine because of the high CPU and memory usage.

OpenSolaris also requires (ok, you can now create your own local proxy repository) a network connection to install zones and there have been occasions where they were having problems and no zones could be built.  Once I had to wait 2 days before I was able to build any zones (local repositories weren't available at that time).

IPS uses a lot of memory from my experience.

Haven't tried the text installer, but you have no choice with the live CD about what gets installed.  Installation takes quite some time compared to FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

I like Crossbow and Zones/Containers (but Zones/Containers are in Solaris 10); Crossbow isn't going to be backported to Solaris 10.  Like the exclusive and shared-ip for zones.  Haven't tried lx branded zones.  Like ZFS.

Solaris' SMF has always reminded me of AIX srcmstr in a way.

Sun was moving away from Jumpstart (not a bad thing, but I invested a lot of time getting it working right) to Automated Installer which isn't fully functional, yet you need AI to install OpenSolaris on SPARC.  Of course there is now a text installer for Sparc but haven't tried it.


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## trev (Mar 6, 2010)

Tried it last year, during the second or third patch update it was so borked it no longer booted. Experiment over. Anyway, I prefer twm for my window manager


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## Graaf_van_Vlaanderen (Mar 7, 2010)

I have been using Solaris 10, SXCE, SXDE and OpenSolaris for my Desktop. It's true that from time to time there are some issues, but if it hangs after an upgrade, you can always fall back to the previous boot environment. Currently, I'm running built 133. 
It also takes some time before new software works fine. But once it works, it works flawless, like with Songbird.


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## ikbendeman (Mar 8, 2010)

Oko said:
			
		

> SUN microsystems has fantastic documentation. Obviously you have never visited SUN's web-site.
> 
> 
> Hardware support for what? For win modems and shitty i386 junk. Common, Solaris was written for Sparc. OpenSolaris started as a port to i386. Far what is written has no competition.Note! It is not written for desktop users that is for sure. It is not even written for firewall or embedded hardware
> ...



I have been to their website. I was asking for something like the FreeBSD Handbook, an all-in one resource. Which it seems they don't. There's plenty of good documentation, just spread out everywhere and not quite as easy to find as I'd hoped. As far as it not being a 'desktop OS' that doesn't seem to be what the developers say... I just read a pdf (its on the livecd I think) that states to the contrary...


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## vermaden (Mar 8, 2010)

ikbendeman said:
			
		

> How do you feel about OpenSolaris?


Not very well, taken from other thread:




			
				vermaden said:
			
		

> I have tried many OSes, but FreeBSD seems less fscked up from all the others, something like _'jack of all trades'_.
> 
> I started with Linux but all this mess was pain in the ass, too many daemons, hald, udev, modprobe.d, various arguments to loaded modules (!?) configuration spread across all files under /etc, package management ...
> 
> ...


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