My previous post was a quick summary on what I had done the past few days on OpenSolaris. I think OpenSolaris deserves more than that and hence I will try to run a series of reviews and my experience with tinkering OpenSolaris.
The executive summary of this post: OpenSolaris though has the same look and feel as other gnome-powered Linux, there are little inconveniences that really get into the way. This post will point out mainly what I find weird/inconvenient.
Disclaimer: I am a regular user of Windoze (XP only, if you care to know) and Linux for over 10 years. My experience with Solaris only amounted to logging into the UltraSparc boxes in my university to change the login password because all other stations running Windoze or Linux were occupied. Therefore I consciously or unconsciously will treat anything that deviates from the Linux-way as 'weird'. Be warned.
Good Stuff of OpenSolaris:
- ZFS is sexy with tonnes of cool features. However you will only see limited strength when you have only one hdd.
- The Solaris kernel is well-thought of, and I feel the organization of the configuration files is comparable, if not more sane, than most Linux distributions
- Utilities like crossbow and dtrace are famous. Personally I have no experience with any of those and definitely will put my hands on them asap.
- [Updated 3 Aug 2008] The following issue only applies to my old P4 machine. I installed OpenSolaris on a newer machine, and the following problem didn't show up.
I used a USB keyboard, but OpenSolaris cannot detect it. Therefore I cannot choose the Grub boot option and have to wait for 30 seconds for the menu to time-out and execute the default option. Ironically during bootup even the BIOS can read from that keyboard and I have no problem in maneuvering the CMOS BIOS menus. Needless to say, Ubuntu doesn' t have this problem. - OpenSolaris doesn't fully support Pentium 4. 'dmesg' report SpeedStep is disabled
- While trying to format my Linux-formatted Seagate 80GB HDD with zfs, it reports the drive can only be formatted with 'utility provided by the drive manufacturer'. However without formating, zfs can read and write from it fine. This confuses me a whole lot. Until now I am not sure if the drive is ok because I can't think of a way to verify its surfaces. In most OSes, you can just format the drive and get to know the status of the drive. Not for zfs.
- While nfs is working right out of the box, samba is a bitch to set up. This is due to although the packages are installed, they are not set up properly. First I have to create the smb.conf by copying it from the example file, next I need to configure svcadm by importing the samba.xml file somewhere in the filesystem using 'svccfg import'. Also the default samba.xml needs some modification to invoke nmbd. All in all, smb (samba) is a pain to use compared to nfs. I guess smb in such condition may due to security reason, but come on, at least there should be proper documents somewhere. What I could find was blog posts here and there and it is very frustrating to crawl around the web like crazy just to get samba working.
- Networking is harder than necessary(covered by my previous post here). If network auto-magic cannot configure the networking settings properly, user needs to disable it manually and enable the default networking interface, which is trouble-some.
In terms of usability, OpenSolaris still lags behind and for now I think it is more suitable for more experienced and tech-savvy computer users
3 comments:
you are falling in love again. deeply......
... the kind of love that guys have for porshes, footballs, and armies, you've got it for opensolaris.
may you have many exciting nights
As long as I still find it interesting I will continue, because what else I can do in the evening anyway...? :P
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