Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Thursday May 29, 2008

Running on the metal

As I type this, I've blown away my old Solaris partition on my laptop and I have OpenSolaris 2008.05 laying it's bits down. I'd hoped to finish this blog by the time it was done, but it seems to be going too fast (it's at 68%).

I'd wanted to do this some time back, but between the MySQL conference, CommunityOne, the hands-on-labs at JavaOne (for which we received a 4.3 out of 5 review!) and working with customers, there's been little time to get things planned out to install the system. I wanted a good backup or two as well, not so much that I need one since I keep all important data replicated to my NFS home directory at Sun, but just in case.

My old installs have been good to me, but I've not lived day-to-day with OpenSolaris yet. I've installed it on a few systems (like this one) and in VirtualBox a number of times. Still, running on the metal should give me the ability to update easily, minimize the install (even I don't use all of the packages!), move to ZFS root, etc.

(the install just finished)

I'll also be able to more easily work with things in our Web Stack Experimental Repository.

Well, it's all rebooted, so now I'm off to bring back some selected files from the backups.