Well I finally bit the bullet and installed opensolaris 2008.05 onto a dedicated machine. My conclusion is that if you are a home user looking for a new desktop solution, stay with Linux at this point in time.
The install to get to a standalone non-networked machine was fairly painless.
However as always with solaris/opensolaris x86 it never seems to have usefull network drivers.
Network driver problems
Lots of searching later I found a site that walked through getting the card details from prtconf and then searching on pcixxxx,xxxx (the values shown for vendor and product from the prtconf)
And that search turned up a known problem in the opensolaris knowledge base with VIA chipsets, that recomended getting the vfe driver and compiling it; compiling it as the binaries shipped were for something2 and for opensolaris 200805 it needed to be compiled for something3.
So I pulled down the vfe tar file and… what, no gcc installed.
So I went to www.sunfreeware.com and pulled down gcc and libiconv and installed those packages, and while gcc was there there were no header files !.
Gave up and tried to install the existing binary drivers.
Bugger, no joy at all, still couldn’t find the card, no vfe0 to configure up.
Went to plan B, way back when I installed my first solaris10 0606 release into a QEMU virtual machine, I needed to use the community boot disk drivers to get the VM card detected, I decided to throw those onto the system.
In they went, every single driver as a last ditch effort. A touch /reconfigure and a reboot and there it was, a rf0 had appeared in ifconfig.
A little fiddling with resolve.conf, nsswitch.conf, hosts and the creation of the hostname.rf0 and hostname.rf0:1 files (only one card, so external and internal addresses had to be added to the card).
One more reboot, and yippee, I could get to public and internal network addresses.
And onward, maybe ?
So, uninstall the gcc and libiconv from sunfreeware.com, into the opensolaris package manager and pull down gcc from there, and voila the header files appear.
Pulled down openoffice and the mp3 media player as well using the package manager for good measure.
But there is no javac (there is a java but what use is that for a developer). And a search in the package manager on java shows nothing ???.
Ok, put that on hold while I finish the install.
I hit the ‘update all’ in package manager, like a good little boy.
It says it needs a new version of SUNWipkg and SUNWipkg-gui before allowing an update all, so I ok that. It says sucessfull and it will now restart package manager. It restarts package manager.
So I hit the update all buttun again, guess what. It says it needs a new version of SUNWipkg and SUNWipkg-gui before allowing an update all, I’ve just done that !. Reboot.
Reboot done. Into package manager and hit ‘update all’. Guess what. It says it needs a new version of SUNWipkg and SUNWipkg-gui before allowing an update all, so I ok that. 0 packages to install but it says sucessfull and it will now restart package manager. Waiting, waiting, no it seems it will not reststart package manager this time.
I stop and start package manager. I hit update all. Guess what, yes you guessed it. Still wants to update those two packages first.
With update all not working I’m seriously considering putting Linux back on this PC, at least that gets updates.
For now I will progress on, as this particular PC is designated by backup webserver, that until this point in time was pxe boot installed weekly to keep it uptodate, so I can get it back on linux simply be selecting network boot if I need to. No harm in proceeding.
Despite the fact that update all is not working, after the first update all request a search within package manager did list some java entries. Nothing simple like an SDK though. I may have to pull it down manually but at this point in time I just requested package manager to pull down everything that matched java (bugger again, I don’t want netbeans, the PC only has 512Mb memory, but maybe that will get a javac ?).
The next steps.
If javac appears I will move some of my test code from the solaris 10 0606 VM to this PC and see if it compiles/runs correctly with the gcc and java versions. That is preferable as developing in a VM image is slow (not to mention I only use the 0606 VM to ensure my code developed under Linux remains portable to solaris so I would prefer not to have to keep it).
If it doesn’t I’ll move across the compiled gcc binaries and jar files from my 0606 image to see if they run ok. If they do I guess I use the 0606 VM for development and just test the results on opensolaris 200805 (no I wont’ I’ll put opensolaris 200805 into a VM as well if thats all I’m going to use it for (or ditch it all together and just stay on 0606)).
Conclusion
As shipped opensolaris is definately not for the home user looking for a desktop replacement. People used to say Linux would never become mainstream as it lacked too many drivers. Well Linux is there now and at least as plug and play friendly as windows (apart from wintel modem chipsets anyway), but opensolaris is not ready for the home user.
As opensolaris is not designed for the corporate world either, opensolaris should be reserved for those that like playing/hacking around with different things; at least for now anyway. And opensolaris has a purpose, it is feeding lots of new improvements through to SUNs sorais 10/solaris express editions which would otherwise never have reached commercial users, so keep up the good work opensolaris developers.
In the commercial world companies would buy a server from SUN with solaris 10 on it (or upgrade existing hardware to solaris 10) with the server hardware certified by SUN to have drivers and just work. Home users on an x86 PC unfortunately are more likely to not have supported hardware than to have it and home users are not likely to want to spend weeks searching the web for drivers.
So my conclusion is that if you are a home user looking for a new desktop solution, or a service provider providing development servers; stay with Linux at this point in time.
And 0606 came with apache and apache2, but theres only a /etc/apache directory I’ve just noticed. Hmmm, and mysql doesn’t seem to be there either, I’m sure that came with 0606 althouh I know I removed them and compiled the latest apache2, mysql and php from source they should be there ?. Maybe this is no use to those who want to use opensolaris as a server either.
