Dear all, I would like to share my experience with belenix and opensolaris from a user and sysadmin point of view. they may be biased but this is what i feel. some are generic to solaris and some are specific to distros like opensolaris or belenix.
A very short description about me. I've been using linux for the past 8 yrs. After being introduced to solaris (belenix) some 2-3 yrs back by sriram, i've been keeping a close watch on it's progress. I've been using opensolaris 2009.06 as my primary platform for the past 6 months since the time it was available for preview. Installation: Installation has become easy for both belenix and osol. Package manager: osol: IPS has improved since 2008.05 but still needs a lot of polishing and boosting. belenix: has done some cool stuff with spkg. i installed it in a new BE and installation was amazingly fast. i especially liked the multi threaded or simultaneous download stuff or whatever u call it. it really cool. osol: takes ages to create a plan, then download the package and install it. i even downloaded the entire repo 7.2 gig and created a local repo and used it for install, still hardly and performance improvement. belenix: stuff get's installed amazingly fast from the internet so why to download the entire repo. belenix: has almost everything in their repository, right from media players my fav. mplayer to vlc etc etc. and flashplayers stuff like that. osol: with osol, i've to keep searching for stuff and downloading from various repos. repos like LWS has been shutdown which was really a nice piece of work. osol: ipython + auto completion doesn't work on osol, says the required readline library is missing. belenix: works like a charm. osol: brasero is not working on osol 0906 . belenix: haven't tried on belenix. generall: my printer deskjet F4288 works on both but the scanner doesn't. although good documentation would have helped to get things done without frustration. it was only when i got opensolaris bible and i read how to use cups rather than the default lp manager, that the printer is working. Documentation: general: Lots of scope for improvement in documentation is required. especially small small howtos to get the job done. the knowledge that i've gathered if from the documentation from osol websites and opensolaris bible and pro opensolaris and various blogs from blogs.sun.com. this much reading the information requires time to gather and read. sometimes because of critical nature of work, you might not have the luxury to search for information on various resources. eg: how to install songbird with codecs to play mp3 files.? how to install media players like mplayer or vlc on osol? how to install and configure dns server or dhcp server? skype: general: skype is still not available, which sometimes can become a bottleneck. as i guess, majorly ppl use it for voip communication. wireless+virtualbox: general : in my experience wireless driver rum in my case is better than the one on linux. but a drawback with virtualbox is that we can't use guest os to use the wireless card for lan communication as it's still not supported. ext3 vs zfs: general: interoperability (read,write) from ext3 to zfs and vice versa is not there, which causes a lot of pain and frustration. moinak's driver to mount linux has been helpful but again it's only read access. torrent/vuze: general: there are hardly choices for torrent clients. in my experience, transmission is not that a good torrent client neither on linux nor on osol. azureus is the best till date according to what i used. but installing azureus is still a pain if you don't have the proper links to information or howto. openoffice: general: it would be really nice if we could have openoffice by default in the installation cd. hardware detection: general: it becomes difficult to determine the different parts from prtdiag, if you don't have the gui , especially while using ssh. prtdiag should give information in a more user friendly manner. System admin: general: For the popular acceptance of the osol as a platform more information/documentation is needed. for eg: use cases or eg: and how to's about: - natting - port forwarding - wireless. - different servers, like , dhcp, dns, squid, ldap etc etc. general: SUNWopenldap fails to start from smf, lot of R&D and googleing resulted that, it might be the problem of the manifest file, but nobody knows what's the issue and how to resolve it. general: elisa media center is not working for me. may be it's b'cas of ati drivers or may be not, i don't know. google toolbar: general: i miss google toolbars on osol. i use it big time for bookmarks on linux. general: i miss netspeed applet to monitor my network bandwidth and data transfer rate. although i recently got it and installed from the contrib repo but it doesn't work with the wlan card (rum0) in my case, haven't tried that with lan card yet. i intend to create a central information resource for osol , something similar to linuxguide.org . i've started writing blogs about the solutions i found for the pain points i mentioned above and would be collecting more info and posting it to my blog. -- Regards, Arun Tomar blog: http://linuxguy.in website: http://www.solutionenterprises.co.in -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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