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I Love This OpenSolaris

Tuesday May 13, 2008

Yesterday evening I spend some time playing with the newly released OpenSolaris 2008.05 CD-ROM, and it's just so amazing!

I don't have a PC at home (not exactly, read the end of this post), so I try it out on my wife's ThinkPad notebook (she would not allow me to install a new OS there). Everything works so fine, although I don't like the continuous humming from the CD-ROM drive.

I feel satisfied at these points especially:

Nice network support. It automatically find the wireless card, detect the access points, and ask me to choose one. After I choose one, and enter the password, it connects and shows me a new IP address as a balloon on the upper right corner.
Nice sound support. Recording and playback all OK.
Excellent out-of-box i18n support. The Firefox browser can display Chinese correctly and the IME (input method Editor) is already loaded so I can just choose Simplified Chinese and enter Chinese without any extra configuration.

I also notice an unexpected fact:

jack@opensolaris:~$ echo $PATH
/usr/gnu/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

This is quite astonishing. OpenSolaris now chooses GNU tools as the default command sets, which means it's not compatible with the original Solaris. This can even be a nightmare sometimes. However, for Linux users, that might be the best news for them. Anyway I guess Linux users are the main people the new release is trying to attract.

I've just assembled my old desktop PC and started to install OpenSolaris there. Will need to buy a wireless network card for it.

[4] Comments

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Posted at 04:40PM May 13, 2008 by wangwj in General
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Uh, i18n is a waaay from excelent. Or even usable. First, selecting Polish as keyboard layout configures system with broken layout, compatibile with maybe 0,0000001% of all deployed Polish keyboards.
Second, there are no Polish translation in OS2008.05. Which is crippling made by Sun, as GNU utils and GNOME Desktop are fully translated upstream.

Posted by zdz on May 13, 2008 at 07:21 PM CST #

personnally i'm a big linux fan, and i've tried for a couple of days this brand new opensolaris, and it's not that bad, but there is still no way i'm going to throw my linux away

good start though

Posted by hugsy_75 on May 13, 2008 at 07:58 PM CST #

Polish translations is available. As for limited space on LiveCD there are two editions of OpenSolaris:

First one is using less effective compression and has lower language support, but better performance:
http://dlc.sun.com/osol/opensolaris/2008/05/os200805.iso
(you can install Polish support after installation from repositories)

Second one has full language support, better compression, but lower performance:
http://dlc.sun.com/osol/opensolaris/2008/05/os200805g.iso

As for Polish keyboard it will be fixed, see:
http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=1801.
There are easy workarounds by using xorg.conf ot setxkbmap:
http://blogs.sun.com/sunwg11nprg/en_US/entry/setxkbmap_in_nevada

Posted by hroosha on June 23, 2008 at 08:50 PM CST #

Yup, it is very nice to have IME working out-of-the-box. But when I use PinYin, and the fonts that appears (in the box that prompts me to select the chinese character) is too small for me. How do I change the font size?

I right-click on the "SC" (top panel, left side of date) and chose preference. I see "General/Language/Scripts/Trigger Key/Keyboard/Misc" but no option to change font size.

I right-click the IME and chose 首选项, I see 系统设置, 输入法设置 but no option to change font size.

It was so easy to change the font size in SCIM. Right-click IME, choose "SCIM setup" -> Panel -> GTK.

Posted by 91.194.90.92 on September 19, 2008 at 01:30 AM CST #