First Dive into OpenSolaris

These few days I have been playing and experimenting with OpenSolaris 2008.05 and Ubuntu 8.04.

At the surface, OpenSolaris looks very similar to Ubuntu or any distro of Linux that runs gnome:

• It also provides most of the open source tools that shipped with Linux
• The look and feel are 'almost' the same
• It has the authentic Unix directory file structures and design philosophy which Linux borrows from

The first difference I noticed is the incomplete functionality of the OpenSolaris UI (or 'frontend' in software engineering jargon) . Some of the tasks can only be done at the command line.

For example, the UI only provides button for the user to shutdown the system, but there is no 'restart' button. If you want to restart the system, you need to open a text terminal, and type 'reboot'.

Another example will be the network setting. When OpenSolaris boots up, it has the Network Auto-magic daemon (nwand) running. If your network settings are unusual or you want to manually do some settings, you have to disable the nwan and enable the 'default' settings manually. When you click on the 'networking' icon, it will just ask you the network cannot be set while nwan is running and you have to disable nwan first. It then points you to read nwan(1m) and let you figure out the rest.

Guess where you can set all these? Command line of course.

svcadm disable svc:/network/physical:nwam
svcadm enable svc:/network/physical:default

Since the shell will accept shortest unique string, lazy smart user will do:

svcadm disable nwam
svcadm enable physical:default

For those of us who are used to text terminals and commands, OpenSolaris is something that we know and love. In fact, often command line is desirable since it is often more responsive, and tasks are easier to automate.

The 2008.05 release represents a good progress for OpenSolaris and I feel the underlying backend is reasonably stable. The remaining work for Sun and the OpenSolaris community will be:

• Port more packages to the OpenSolaris platform
• Enhance the functionalities of the frontend without sacrificing the versatility provided by the underlying infrastructure (i.e. tool chain and command sets)

One of the main attractions of OpenSolaris is the renown ZettaByte File System (zfs) which is really really sexy. According to Sun, zfs has self-healing and redundancy built right in the file system and this could easily make hardware backup solutions like RAID or tapes obsolete. If the claim is true, we are seeing yet another example where software slowly replaces hardware functionalities.

I have a zfs set up (one 80GB hdd) and now managed to export it as nfs. My plan will be get Samba to run on it and thus creating a central repository for both Windoze and Linux boxes.

Stay tuned.