Uwe Dippel wrote:
[i]Thankfully, no one is working on an Ubuntu clone at Sun. The goal of
the OpenSolaris 200x releases, as I see it, are to create a modern OS
distribution that innovates using OpenSolaris technologies such as
DTrace, ZFS, and more.[/i]
Yes. For the last 2.5 years I was hoping so much that OpenSolaris could come flying off. I have a double-boot install, and always preferred the OpenSolaris partition. It simply is - IMHO - more polished and more elegant. I have put up with a bunch of shortcomings therefore, even invested in RAM (rather cheap, but still, Ubuntu runs easily from 1 GB, nevermind). I didn't mind to lose installs and having to redo them, finally Nevada is a moving target.
I put up with sendmail losing mail, despite of most qualified help in here (search the archives if in doubt), I have tried my best to connect to my access point through wire and WiFi using nwam - and given up despite of a lot of very qualified help in here (search the archives if in doubt), I have given up to have my single WiFi-dongle coming up as rum0 (this is a minor inconvenience), I have given up to expect to mount and copy files to FAT32 reliably and enjoyed the most qualified help in here (search the archives if in doubt). I have given up on the idea to run ZFS on USB-drives, because in bad circumstances (yanking it), the pool might be irreversibly lost as confirmed by the authorities in here (search the archives if in doubt). I have known how to work around not being able to print properly from Gnome applications to A4, aside from editing and modifying the respective ppd file in a specific, not disclosed manner, (search the archives if in doubt). I didn't mind booti
ng
to Failsafe after a certain percentage of power outages just to recover the boot archive until I received a personal workaround (search the archives if in doubt).
Again, Nevada is a moving target. Though, what did get on my optimism w.r.t. the future of the system that I ran and encouraged others to run, was that many of those little bugs - actually the larger part - have not been tackled AFAIK. Yes, there was and is plenty of invention going on in OpenSolaris. But based on a system riddled with little diseases here and there, and diseases that inconvenience the average user, all is not well with stacking more inventions on top of sick code.
Recently, I was informed that I should not run the system on 32 bit, and definitively not expect reliability without mirrored drives (search the archives if in doubt). I'm already using nvidia chipsets due to their low power draw, without any additional cards (6150, 7050), single strips of 2 GB (consuming less energy than 2 of 1 GB), single (green) drives. The 2 x 2 GB that I need for OpenSolaris already form a thorn in my eyes. If now the elitism is great enough to require me to buy 'quality hardware' (search the archives if in doubt) and run another disk, sorry, but then I'll take out one of the 2 GB RAM strips, abscond the idea of buying and running (and powering) another hard drive, and preferably boot to that Efficient Eazel on the other partition. Because it does all of those salient points further up; and more importantly, without upgrades of RAM and disks. And when I will miss my OpenSolaris, I can always start it in VirtualBox.
What does this have to do with Oracle buying SUN? I still, still, have slight
hopes of Oracle stopping all the nonsense that we have seen happening in here,
and building a great Solaris 11 (whatever it will be called by then) on a
basically sane and Free code base.
Uwe,
As you might imagine, development products don't have the same resources
allocated to them and don't have the same amount of "bake time."
Personally, I've been using almost nothing but OpenSolaris for years
now. I use it to take notes in class, write my class papers, listen to
music thanks to Fluendo, perform my development work, browse, read
email, and more. I've even enjoyed watching TV shows using Hulu/Flash.
You took time to detail some of the issues you've encountered, and I'm
certain others appreciate that. However, as you've pointed out, you've
been using a development version of a product; not a fully-tested,
fully-qa'd, and fully-documented product.
I would encourage you to continue to test and document issues you
encounter for the benefit of others and provide feedback about how
OpenSolaris can be improved.
Cheers,
--
Shawn Walker
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