I've always been a Unix junkie, of course mostly running Linux for a decade now, but Solaris is starting to look more and more like a real modern option. We use a lot of opensolaris at $dayjob mostly just because of its wonderful filesystem zfs. I have to say that I am excited about opensolaris much more than I ever was with Solaris proper! With older releases, the non GNU userland was just simply painful and by my "sense" pretty stupid in many ways. Most of the pain is now gone with the new opensolaris releases. Since the release of opensolaris 2008.11 is pretty close (well it's November now already), I decided to snatch the pre-release iso and take it for a spin on my HP Pavilion 6700 laptop!
Visiting http://www.genunix.org/ to download the iso file, I snatched the file which was significantly more than 700MB, so I had to burn that to DVD. The opensolaros 2008.11 iso is both a Live DVD that is also installable. That is sweet, as I can run opensolaris now directly from the live DVD and install latter if I want. Starting the DVD was easy, just pop it in, BIOS boots chooses DVD. Afterwards you stare at a GRUB screen, I simply chose the default option and let it boot the GUI environment. You get asked for keyboard layout and language, I just hit "enter" for the defaults (US/English). More than a minute later (booting is slow since it's using an optical drive), you get the GUI desktop. It's basically a Gnome envrionment.
Let's make sure we're really on opensolaris :)
jack@opensolaris:~$ cat /etc/release
OpenSolaris 2008.11 snv_100a X86
Copyright 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.
Assembled 24 October 2008
jack@opensolaris:~$ uname -a
SunOS opensolaris 5.11 snv_100 i86pc i386 i86pc Solaris
Visiting http://www.genunix.org/ to download the iso file, I snatched the file which was significantly more than 700MB, so I had to burn that to DVD. The opensolaros 2008.11 iso is both a Live DVD that is also installable. That is sweet, as I can run opensolaris now directly from the live DVD and install latter if I want. Starting the DVD was easy, just pop it in, BIOS boots chooses DVD. Afterwards you stare at a GRUB screen, I simply chose the default option and let it boot the GUI environment. You get asked for keyboard layout and language, I just hit "enter" for the defaults (US/English). More than a minute later (booting is slow since it's using an optical drive), you get the GUI desktop. It's basically a Gnome envrionment.
Let's make sure we're really on opensolaris :)
jack@opensolaris:~$ cat /etc/release
OpenSolaris 2008.11 snv_100a X86
Copyright 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.
Assembled 24 October 2008
jack@opensolaris:~$ uname -a
SunOS opensolaris 5.11 snv_100 i86pc i386 i86pc Solaris
As you can see the default desktop looks clean and is fairly attractive. After that I started the DDU (Device Driver Utility), a nice utility made by Sun to check your hardware compatibility level with opensolaris. I was of course expecting issues here as this is a recentish laptop bought only a couple of months ago and opensolaris' hardware support on generic x86 hardware not mention laptops is well, less than stellar to say the least. Or at least that was the impression I was under. I was however very positively impressed when the DDU said "Driver Problems: 0" and showed that there were drivers for every single piece of hardware in that laptop. That was actually nice!
Other nice touches as well, is the laptop's screen automatically started in the native 1280x800 mode, and was using the native (closed) nvidia driver
As you can see, life is not full of roses, the volume while works fine and audio generally is ok, however, it seems the volume bar can only control the "master" volume mixer! My Fedora10 rawhide shows a zillion volume bars for all of my hardware features (line in/out, headphones, pcm, ... etc). In general I felt the audio stack needed some work on opensolaris. I wish they'd put in an alsa compatibility layer, that should probably help porting applications. Another issue, was connecting to my WPA2 home network. At first the network applet was very stubborn and would not connect to my network. After a lot of clicking here and there and displaying dialogs which were asking for (username?!) and password for the wireless network, it somehow got connected. After that the connection seemed pretty stable.
Being on the Internet, I started Firefox 3.0.1, pretty solid and fast as usual. Gotta love open-source portable apps ;) Now is the time to put this OS to the test. Let's see if it's gonna let me on youtube.com! It becomes quickly apparent that flash player is not installed by default. A quick visit to adobe, I download a tar file, uncompress it. There were no READMEs of any sort, just a couple of binary files. However creating a "plugins" directory under ~/.mozilla and copying those 2 files under it, seemed to have done the trick. I can now play youtube videos with no problems. Actually the whole video playback experience, and generally firefox seems faster and more responsive than under fedora. All in all, I'm very happy with the browsing experience.
Now I decided to go ahead and take a shot atcrashing suspending my laptop! In order to test that, you will need to enable it by adding a line in /etc/power.conf:
Other nice touches as well, is the laptop's screen automatically started in the native 1280x800 mode, and was using the native (closed) nvidia driver
As you can see, life is not full of roses, the volume while works fine and audio generally is ok, however, it seems the volume bar can only control the "master" volume mixer! My Fedora10 rawhide shows a zillion volume bars for all of my hardware features (line in/out, headphones, pcm, ... etc). In general I felt the audio stack needed some work on opensolaris. I wish they'd put in an alsa compatibility layer, that should probably help porting applications. Another issue, was connecting to my WPA2 home network. At first the network applet was very stubborn and would not connect to my network. After a lot of clicking here and there and displaying dialogs which were asking for (username?!) and password for the wireless network, it somehow got connected. After that the connection seemed pretty stable.
Being on the Internet, I started Firefox 3.0.1, pretty solid and fast as usual. Gotta love open-source portable apps ;) Now is the time to put this OS to the test. Let's see if it's gonna let me on youtube.com! It becomes quickly apparent that flash player is not installed by default. A quick visit to adobe, I download a tar file, uncompress it. There were no READMEs of any sort, just a couple of binary files. However creating a "plugins" directory under ~/.mozilla and copying those 2 files under it, seemed to have done the trick. I can now play youtube videos with no problems. Actually the whole video playback experience, and generally firefox seems faster and more responsive than under fedora. All in all, I'm very happy with the browsing experience.
Now I decided to go ahead and take a shot at
S3-support enableAnd then enter:
pfexec /usr/sbin/pmconfigAfterwards, I could not find any GUI elements or commands to initiate a suspend! I hit the power button, and Gnome popped up a dialog asking what I wanted to do, I chose "Suspend" and a couple of seconds later, the laptop was suspended, with the power led blinking. I thought "sweet" .. It was pretty late, so I went to sleep, and thought I'll see if it wakes up (usually much harder) tomorrow. The next day, I open the lid, and boom, it starts back where it were! A fully successful (Hurraaay!) suspend/resume cycle, well I really did not expect that from opensolaris! Here is the relevant log part from /var/adm/messages
Nov 6 19:25:42 opensolaris genunix: [ID 535284 kern.notice] System is being suspended
Nov 6 19:25:44 opensolaris nvidia: [ID 702911 kern.notice] NOTICE: NVRM: RmPowerManagement: 4
Nov 6 19:25:44 opensolaris acpica: [ID 530733 kern.notice] NOTICE: acpica_ddi_setwake: could not evaluate _PRW
Nov 7 15:13:34 opensolaris last message repeated 9 times
Nov 7 15:13:34 opensolaris pcihp: [ID 709949 kern.notice] NOTICE: pcihp (pcie_pci0): card is inserted in the slot pcie1 (pci dev 0)
Nov 7 15:13:34 opensolaris genunix: [ID 358043 kern.warning] WARNING: ieee80211_crypto_enmic failed.
Nov 7 15:13:34 opensolaris mac: [ID 486395 kern.info] NOTICE: iwk0 link down
Nov 7 15:13:34 opensolaris acpica: [ID 530733 kern.notice] NOTICE: acpica_ddi_setwake: could not evaluate _PRW
Nov 7 15:13:34 opensolaris last message repeated 1 time
Nov 7 15:13:36 opensolaris nvidia: [ID 702911 kern.notice] NOTICE: NVRM: RmPowerManagement: 5
Nov 7 15:13:36 opensolaris gnome-session[756]: [ID 702911 daemon.warning] WARNING: Could not ask power manager to suspend: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.
Nov 7 15:13:36 opensolaris in.routed[474]: [ID 238047 daemon.warning] interface iwk0 to 192.168.11.3 turned off
Nov 7 15:13:38 opensolaris /sbin/dhcpagent[2275]: [ID 967406 daemon.warning] refreshing state on iwk0
Nov 7 15:13:39 opensolaris genunix: [ID 583038 kern.notice] System has been resumed.
My conclusion at this point, is that opensolaris is now much more user friendly than it once was, it had no problems detecting my hardware and using it, most of the same applications I use on Linux are there for opensolaris as well. Support for laptops and suspend/resume is not that bad it seems (or I'm extremely lucky!). However, more work needs to be put into improving the audio stack, and other niceties like bluetooth. I suspect more hardware support is also necessary. All in all, using opensolaris as a desktop seems viable if you're coming from a Linux background at least. I still prefer Linux of course for the convenience and for knowing I can almost get anything done with it. However, I will keep a close eye on opensolaris. Overall, I am impressed not only with the current state of the system, but more so with the rate of progress that has been made!
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