> I am being critical here but I'm not angry. Just not > really impressed. > several years ago Sun was kind of promoting Open > Solaris as being a viable alternative to MS Windows. > But they didn't really inform people that it really > was not user friendly, plug and play and for the > common person. Least ways that was my observation.
Hi Jay, welcome to the world of UNIX operating systems! I don't recall Sun making such a bold claim but I suppose it's the kind of thing Jonathan Schwartz might have said (but whether it's really viable for you or not depends on what you were using Windows for). However, if I was trying to convince people to try my new operating system I don't think I would say anything bad or off-putting about it but just recommend they try it and see if they like it. I think you are an unusual newbie if I may say so because most people here would already have tried Linux, so a lot of the work on OpenSolaris, rightly or wrongly, is to make it more 'Linux friendly' than Solaris was. I suppose this is a reason, if not an excuse, for the lack of guidance for a 'convert' from Windows to Unix. For what it's worth, I was able to install OpenSolaris on a Dell laptop where it recognised and preserved the Windows partition and the boot menu offers Windows as an option. I get the impression from some other posts in this thread that maybe things started badly with either a corrupted download or the wrong CD image. Regarding the drivers, one thing you should realise about any non Microsoft OS is that they have a much harder time getting good driver support. The vast majority of hardware out there is running Windows, and manufacturers always work closely with Microsoft to provide well-tested and qualified Windows drivers for their hardware. The next popular platform is Mac, but since Apple control the hardware and won't allow Mac OS on 3rd party platforms the device driver support is a moot point. Then we get to the 'open source' OSes like Linux and OpenSolaris. Linux is by far more popular, so some manufacturers begrudgingly throw together a basic Linux driver or give out enough register information to allow a driver to be written for their hardware, but in general they don't like the fact that the open source license might 'give away' some trade secret about some special differentiating feature of their product. Even the OpenSolaris binary distribution currently includes closed-source device drivers which would have to be rewritten if Oracle decided to pull the license for them. The level of device support is improving with each release as you are seeing, but thanks to a tremendous effort from a much smaller community than Linux. > I am the only > user and am the administrator, I should not see the > message "you need administrator privileges" to do > whatever. There are just too many things I have to > change to make it quicker and easier and more open. This concept of requiring elevated privileges for security-related tasks is actually considered good practice, and OpenSolaris has a sophisticated (and rather confusing) implementation of this called RBAC (look it up). The 'administrator' account in Unix is called root, but in OpenSolaris it isn't actually available as a normal user account but rather a 'role'. This forces you to login as a non-privileged user for most everyday tasks, and you have to assume the role of root or use 'other means' to obtain the necessary permissions to modify the system configuration in some way. This limits the damage that can be done both by malware and by fumbling fingers. This is one of the advances of OpenSolaris over Linux (which uses SELinux, something I understand even less). The other main advances are ZFS, Dtrace, SMF, Crossbow and COMSTAR. Maybe when you look these up you'll be interested in staying with OpenSolaris, or maybe I've already put you off and you'll be downloading Ubuntu! Whatever you do, good luck on your non-Micro$oft adventure. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
