Virtualization has really reached mainstream and made the life of a developers so much easier. It is even more true when I tried the Solaris Express Developer Edition. I am simply blown away by the simplicity of installation, availability of tools in standard location, and mainly the performance of this OS on VMware player with minimal amount of memory footprint.
I got my first taste of using a virtualized OS image in my class project, where in we were given a VMware image of OpenSuSE 10.2 and had to build and play around with "Nachos". From then onwards I was hooked on using VMware image (I have not tried Xen so I cannot compare or comment on Virtualizers) for any OS I needed. You sure need a lot of disk space, but then HDD are so cheap now a days that anyone complaining about this is perhaps still living in the 90s.
Having tried OpenSuSE 10.2 for a while, I was interested in trying out Solaris, especially OpenSolaris. A couple of months ago I did visit sun.com to see if there was a VMware image an there was. But the overall size was around 2GB which initially put me off. Compared to this OpenSuSE with KDE was only 800MB. After further reading on Solaris Express ad having over two months of experience with OpenSuSE 10.2 I realized that it is perhaps easier and simpler to click download from the internet than to figure out which version of gcc I have and what version of GTK, Qt goes with it and installing it.
So last week I decided to clean up my HDD and make space for Solaris Express VMware image. Of course you will need a Solaris Developer Network account. Once I downloaded, everything from installation, starting up, logging in, setting up NIS was a breeze. I even built a couple of open source applications and for the first time I did not need to download and install anything. The standard Sun compiler exists at /opt/SUNWspro/bin and all the GNU packages you will ever need is at /usr/sfw/bin. Solaris Express even comes with NetBeans and Sun Studio IDEs for Java and C/C++ development.
It is my opinion that for startups this could be a really big boost. They do not have to invest a lot on infrastructure to get started and get to have development and testing on a lot of platforms for a very minimal cost. I really believe that with a couple of VMware, Solaris Express on a dual core or dual CPU x64 system with at least 2GB RAM can get a whole company started. This will surely lead to more innovation that is cross platform. And all this is possible because of open source movement, thanks to RMS and other CEOs who followed suite.
Posted by Dick Davies on March 25, 2007 at 12:55 AM PDT #
Posted by Sandeep Konchady on March 25, 2007 at 11:48 AM PDT #
Posted by Dick Davies on March 25, 2007 at 12:04 PM PDT #