I've been using »OpenSolaris 2008.11 for almost a month now as my primary working environment on my Acer Ferrari 4000 AMD64 laptop. It has replaced SXDE (Solaris Express Developer Edition). And I'm really excited about it. It blows all previous versions of OpenSolaris away, at least in this laptop environment.

I love it!

What I especially appreciate is that finally they got the wireless networking working (almost) seamlessly. (Well, with the Ferrari I have to use an Atheros chip set AirLInk 100 PCI card  because the built-in one isn't supported). But now the daemon automatically searches for available wireless networks and lets me decide which one to join. And if I should decide to plug in an ethernet cable, it automatically senses that and switches to the ethernet connection. (Just like my Mac!)

Besides, I've got all the apps I need to work. And the update manager notifies me whenever updated packages are available to download from the repository. Installation was really easy and it automatically preserved my Windows boot volume.

Of course there are always a couple of annoying things. Like sometimes when I switch between wireless and ethernet, or between wireless networkds, I don't always get a working DHCP host IP address assigned. Sometimes it takes a couple of attempts. (Disconnect, reconnect, disconnect again, reconnect again ... Ah! There it is .. were' connected.)  That doesn't happen on my Mac laptop. So I filed a few bugs and we'll see what happens.

The most intgriguing new feature is the "Time Slider" that automatically takes a snapshot of any changed files onto a ZFS filesystem that  you can recover later. It just works, silently, in the background.

And there's a mess of apps on the repository to play with. Especially, of course, Sun Studio Express 2008.11 and OpenOffice 3.0. Firefox 3.0 and Thunderbird are already installed. And it all looks great!

But it's all here and working!