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The Abbreviation "OS" has a new meaning - OpenSolaris

Since last month when Sun released OpenSolaris 2008.05 at CommunityONE (international conference) on 5th May, OS I mean OpenSolaris is making waves all over the world. Attracting users from all background, developers, students, teachers etc. The LIVE-CD funda is really cool and easy for a user to checkout the features of an operating system.

OpenSolaris gives the user the freedom to choose :

1. User can work directly from the LIVE CD. Access all the applications bundled within the distro.
PS : The LIVE-CD boots very fast, seems like it is competing in 100 m Olympic race.

2. If you like the features then you can make a little home for opensolaris and let your machine's soul arise with OpenSolaris

The OS automatically identifies the machine configuration and boots in 32 bit mode or 64 bit accordingly. After the LIVE-CD boots up, we can work normally and we don't have to worry about the HDD partitions being swiped or should I say formatted. On the desktop we can see the device driver utility icon, which tells honestly which all device drivers will be supported and not supported. Don’t get bogged down, solution to all problems are present on opensolaris.org

The 'Install OpenSolaris' icon triggers the actual installation process. The new Caiman Installer make life easy by providing such a user friendly GUI installation that someone actually can't believe how Solaris has progressed (in providing user friendly installation process). After few clicks the installation begins. I'm very impressed by the Time Zone selection window. Usually it will be boring drop-down menu, but here I can see the world map in which the time zones are marked by dots, making selection easy & fun.

After waiting for 40 minutes finally the installation was complete. I think the OpenSolaris team should include some images which should be shown while the OS is being installed. Its boring to see same window for 40 min. While I was rebooting the system I felt rapture cause its been the first time I'm installing an OS which is been so much talked about, loaded with lots of cool features. For me its arguably "A legend in making".

As expected the GRUB identified my windows partition and gave two options to boot. I choose first option and & paved my way to boot into opensolaris. The OS booted very quickly. The installation took only 2.4 GB out of the 8 GB assigned to opensolaris. Login screen is fresh and its deep blue, which is my favorite color

Now I was ready to rock, but first thing I noticed is I don't have LAN, WLAN and Sound Card drivers configured. But who cares !!!

Thanks to opensolaris.org community that I can fix them within record time

Previously I was using Solaris Express Developer Edition (Solaris XDEV). That time I faced these problems for first time. So I browsed through the opensolaris.org site and found all the solutions for my problems. With Over 90,000 registered users, 200+ projects, approximately 4 million google hits, 260 mailing lists etc we can clearly discern how active is the opensolaris community. For my record I blogged about my experiences. So this time, again I followed the same way and configured the drivers. I think its better that I just gives links to my blog entries instead of coping pasting all the code here in this blog entry. Here are my blog entries:

These were done in 32 bit mode. Which in case of OpenSolaris 2008.05 can be done by adding following code to /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst

########################################################
title OpenSolaris 32 bit
bootfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS
module$ /platform/i86pc/boot_archive
######################################################## 

1. http://blogs.sun.com/ajaykumar/entry/configuring_bcm4401_nic_card_in

2. http://blogs.sun.com/ajaykumar/entry/configuring_bcm4310_wlan_in_solaris

3. http://blogs.sun.com/ajaykumar/entry/soundmax_hd_audio_in_solaris

Luckily my blog entries mentioned above were also featured on developers.sun.com under 'Blogs from Experts' 

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Here is my another blog entry on installing MacOS theme in opensolaris. Just keep in mind that after unpacking the theme & icon packages move them to following directories instead of the mentioned ones in the blog entry:

/usr/share/themes
/usr/share/icons

And switch to the theme.

Back to the world of opensolaris, where lot of new and cool features were awaiting me to be used. The first one was the 'Package Manager'. Finally Sun is turning the stones to match a common user's expection. The repository conatins well over 4460 packages ready baked for your service

That was one of the impressive feature. Another big feature is Compizconfig settings manager which is part of default installation. Users who are having Nvidia graphics card can sit back and cherish the cool effects. Here are some of the cool effects :

The Cube effect

Switching between the running Applications

All four Workspaces

Apart from the above two lot of other softwares for example firefox, thunderbird, evolution mail and calendar being the other most used softwares are there, ready for use.

I was expecting openofice will be bundled with the distro but it seemed that the size of the LIVE-CD wasn't permitting it. But it hardly matters as openoffice is available in repository, so I can install it at the moment of my choosing. This clearly explains why the USP of Sun is "Network Is The Computer"

Not to mention the Dtrace and ZFS file system. DTrace is the ultimate troubleshooter for system and application problems in realtime as it has got over 90, 000 probes which can pin-point the problem in a complex network, and no other debugging tool matches upto the caliber of DTrace. The linux distros have backtrace which has got less than 100 probes. And when we talk about ZFS, to begin with it is the Only 128 bit file system in world and includes loads of advanced features such as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion, snapshots ...etc .

These two are one of their kind are the two key nitro-boosters which are helping the dark horse i.e. OpenSolaris to take lead among the top linux & unix flavors available in market

soon become synonymous with OpenSolaris

My ratings (out of 5)
-------------------------------------------------------------
Performance : 4

Features : 3.5

User Interface : 3.5

Price & Value of money : Chill, its open source So ==> 5

---------------------------------------------------------------

Overall : 4

So, don't waste time reading my blog. Grab the OpenSolaris CD and try out to find what it feels like when your machine and OpenSolaris become one entity. Here is the download link or you can order the CD also, for FREE. Cheers !!!