Another Look at openSolaris
It has been about six months since I tried out openSolaris 2008.11, and since then they have released their 2009.06 version. Time for another look!
Download the LiveCD from the above address, and burn to CD as usual. Nothing new there. Boot the LiveCD and start the installation process. It still has the same character/ascii text-style selection input as before, which feels very "old fashioned" compared with the latest Linux distributions. Perhaps because Solaris has always been, and still is to some degree, a "server-oriented" distribution this is considered acceptable, but if they want to get seriously into the desktop market, they are going to have to come up with a spiffy graphical installation process. The one thing their text-based installation process did was make me nostalgic for my days working on a PDP-11 with RSTS/E...
I tried the first installation on my Dual Atom nettop, for no particular reason other than it was sitting here running. I already have a bunch of other Linux installations on it, including Ubuntu Jaunty and Mandriva 2009.1 in primary partitions, and about ten other distributions in an extended partition. As with the previous release, openSolaris still demands its own Primary partition for installation, so I installed it in place of Mandriva, which I will later reinstall in the extended partition. openSolaris still doesn't seem to understand Extended partitions at all, not only will it not install into one, even after installation it doesn't seem to be able to decipher anything inside of an Extended partition, so anything in there is inaccessible. It also apparently doesn't understand ext4 filesystems, even in a Primary partition, since it can't figure out my Jaunty partition.
The installation went smoothly, and although the subsequent reboot from the installed system took rather a long time, it finally did come up, and seemed to work well. The graphic console came up just fine, and I was presented with a fairly standard looking Gnome desktop. A few different icons here and there, but it seemed pretty normal. The wired network connection also came up with no problem, which was a nice improvement from my tests with the 2008.11 release.
The next thing I needed to do was set it up to multi-boot along with my other Linux installations - I actually do need to use that system for productive work sometimes, and it's going to take me a while to get used to openSolaris enough to do that. Unfortunately, they still use what appears to be a Sun-customized version of GRUB, and to say that it "doesn't play well with its peers" is to be generous. The syntax of the grub configuration file is very different from any version I have worked with before (Legacy or GRUB 2). I assumed that because of openSolaris not understanding ext4 or Extended Partitions, I wouldn't be able to multi-boot under control of the openSolaris GRUB, so all I really wanted to do was figure out the boot command so that I could add that to the existing GRUB configuration that I have been using (from openSuSE). But so far I haven't even been able to figure that out, because there is syntax in there for things that I have never seen before. Grrrr.
At this point I decided the best thing to do was get the openSuSE GRUB reinstalled, and try to figure out how to add openSolaris to that boot menu. Now that I think about it, that isn't likely to be easy either, because I'm not optimistic that it will be able to understand the openSolaris ZFS filesystem. Well, maybe it will, at least I'll give it a shot, because I've got to get Ant (the Dual Atom) back to where I can use it again.
I couldn't use the openSolaris GRUB to rewrite the MBR the way that I wanted, because it couldn't see inside any of the Linux partitions, so it wouldn't accept any of them for a "root". Hmmm. Maybe if I had told it "rootnoverify", but I didn't think of that, and it's too late now. I had noticed that there is a new update of the Moblin 2.0 Beta available, which I needed to install. So I put that on a USB stick, booted and installed it (into a Logical Partition on the Extended Partition), and it wrote its GRUB to the MBR. Reboot from that, use its GRUB to rewrite the MBR to boot from the openSuSE 11.1 partition, and the world is a wonderful place again.
Next up will be to try to figure out how to boot openSolaris from the openSuSE 11.1 (or 11.2 for that matter) GRUB. If that works, I'll do a lot more working and testing with openSolaris. If I don't manage to figure that out, I'm afraid I'll have to wait a while again, until I have a system around here which I can simply dedicate to openSolaris. Hmmm. With the number of computers I have around, you would think that I would have one available... Sigh.
In summary, my overall impression of openSolaris, when I consider it only as a stand-alone system, and look at the installation and desktop, is not bad. Obviously its big advantage is that it is in use at a lot of large companies, in a lot of large data centers, so knowing it and being able to work with it and manage it, would be a plus. Its big disadvantage, though, is that its configuration and management are dramatically different from any other Linux (or Unix) distribution (at least that I am familiar with), so even experienced Linux administrators will have a pretty good sized learning curve to really become proficient with it. From what I have seen of the desktop, the difference at the user level is probably not as large, but I can't be sure yet. The place that it really falls down for me, though, is in co-existance and co-operation with other Linux distributions. It just doesn't do that at all well, and that makes it a royal pain on a multi-boot system.
jw 7/8/2009