OpenSolaris

With most of my Uni coursework completed I've had some time to devote to what I really enjoy doing - playing about with computers while not getting a lot done. Quite good timing as OpenSolaris the distribution of Solaris that is based on Nevada (Solaris 11) has just been released. Of course being a bit impatient I found a copy of RC2a to put onto my Thinkpad x40 a last week and today I just ran pkg refresh and pkg image-update to get the release version on the laptop. The IPS (Image Packet System) seems to be a fantastically nice addition to Solaris - my laptop is currently sucking down Open Office using the command pkg install openoffice. It uses a ZFS root file system to make a easy roll back from badly installed packages. Sticking ZFS and live upgrade style bits together with a package management system makes a huge amount of sense - I have hosed enough systems by ignoring warnings about incompatible packages now I can ignore the warnings and have a get out of jail free option In addition to the built in OpenSolaris IPS repository Blastwave.org and Sunfreeware both have IPS repos. A list of any more that pop up will hopefully be found on the new OpenSolaris.com (not .org) forums.

The RC2a install was a fairly painless procedure - though as this laptop also has Ubuntu and Windows on I had to make some use of Gparted to move partitions around so that the Solaris partition was the first primary this was to work around 6690194. Booting into Ubuntu to create the partition using Linux's fdisk and was enough to convince the OpenSolaris installer it could use the partition. Power Management for my Pentium M does not appear to work out of the box I'm not sure at the moment if this is because it is not supported or because OpenSolaris includes no power management utilities that I have located. This makes is a little less useful as a full time laptop OS than I would like Ubuntu for example will drop my 1.5Ghz CPU to 800Mhz when it is not in use - better for battery life and for my leg skin if the laptop happens to be sitting there. Suspend resume is not there yet. Compwiz fancy effects don't work on my puny graphics card either! (boo! Hiss!)

Since I started writing this post my network connection has flaked out and my OpenOffice download has failed (I appear to be connected to the Internet by a bit of wet string these days) .
The beadm utility that is used to manage ZFS boot environment allows you to view the snapshots that are taken before the upgrade was started - I misread this the first time and though that the snapshots where what was upgraded and stupidly unmounted and destroyed the snapshots thinking they where of no use now that the upgrade had failed. In fact they are a snapshot of the untouched system and would be useful if the upgrade failing left you with an unusable system - as I was just installing Open Office I hope I will be ok. But the lesson to take from that would be to re-read things before using any destroy commands!


I'm going to download todays OpenSolaris Live CD as well and stick it on my desktop to see what the experience is like adding it to a system that already has a Nevada install on - hopefully they can be persuaded to co-exist peacefully - at least until I am prepared to move the system entirely to OpenSolaris.