OpenSolaris now on Toshiba laptops

[LinuxMint-4]

OpenSolaris now on Toshiba laptops

Tom Espiner, ZDNet UK

12 December 2008 11:00 AM

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/s ... 785,00.htm


Sun has reached an agreement with Toshiba to pre-install the OpenSolaris operating system on Toshiba laptops.

The laptops will be available in the US from early 2009 and will come with the latest version of OpenSolaris: 2008.11. "Toshiba and Sun are announcing that we're going to pre-configure and optimise OpenSolaris for certain Toshiba models," said Jim McHugh, Sun's vice president of datacentre software, in a promotional video.

The firms have yet to release details on availability, pricing or which laptop models would feature the operating system.

OpenSolaris is Sun's flagship operating system, designed for desktop, server and high-performance computing environments. Features in OpenSolaris 2008.11 include Time Slider, a graphical interface slide bar that allows users to access previous versions of files.

"Time Slider lets us integrate ZFS [file system] snapshots taken automatically by the system with a standard window environment file browser," said Stephen Hahn, OpenSolaris project lead. "It lets you access previous versions of your source code, of your word-processing document or any other thing that you're saving on your system." Developers will have greater access to repositories, said Sun, and will be able to deliver code to OpenSolaris users through the updated package manager.

Sun also extended its OpenSolaris subscription options. There will be two subscription plans: 'production' and 'essentials'.

[MattKingUSA]

I'm download OS right now. It looks all wicked cool. I hope it sucks so I'm tempted to switch from Linux. And by the way KDE4 is the prettiest thing I've ever seen. Smashing good looking DM.

EDIT: My KDE4 comment was totally off topic. And I know that OS doesn't use KDE4 by default. I just wanted to add that to avoid any confusion.

EDIT Again: Oh my dang...OS looks fantastic. If I get a second system I'm running it. Just based on looks alone. Honestly my laptop thought it was a bit out of it's league. It was like, you're really hot...Maybe too hot...I'm going to try and get your data anyway..And surprise it ran like a charm in VB. I'm keeping it installed it's a beautiful OS. Kicks some serious booty.

[Wally Balljacker]

OpenSolaris is kind of neat, but it really makes a terrible desktop, which is why I'm surprised to hear that Toshiba would offer it on their laptops. OpenSolaris is pretty much where Linux was four or five years ago, and software support is really lackluster. I can't see any reason to choose an OpenSolaris laptop over a Linux one. The Linux one is going to be faster, have better hardware integration, more available software, better support, etc. Seriously, what demand is there for an OpenSolaris notebook? It's probably like 1/10 of what it is for a Linux system, and that is already pretty low.

[MattKingUSA]

So, I'm just vm'n it on my desktop and based on looks, Ubuntu 8.10 looks like rubbish in comparison to opensolaris. I'm a KDE4 guy. But just based on looks over all Ubuntu needs to be taking notes because OS looks amazing. Even the default mouse pointer is clear and clean looking. In Ubuntu it looks all foggy and dirty.

EDIT: With that said, nothing beats KDE4 in my book. This thing is clean baby..clean! But dang, I'm thinking about switching to OS just because it seems so together. Just so nice looking...everything looks like it's where it was meant to be. Ubuntu looks a bit thrown together..like..."I think that belongs there...maybe?".

[mowestusa]

So, I'm just vm'n it on my desktop and based on looks, Ubuntu 8.10 looks like rubbish in comparison to opensolaris. I'm a KDE4 guy. But just based on looks over all Ubuntu needs to be taking notes because OS looks amazing. Even the default mouse pointer is clear and clean looking. In Ubuntu it looks all foggy and dirty.

Wouldn't this simply be the result of someone putting some thought into a wallpaper, icon set, and window decorations that work well together. Couldn't you do this yourself by downloading a theme and a cool wallpaper from gnome-look.org?

What is OpenSolaris doing that is so unique from the Linux platform?
Did you have any issues with hardware support in OpenSolaris, which I have heard can be spotty on systems?
Was the software selection large in the OpenSolaris repos (or whatever they call the place where you can download programs)?
Was there a program you have grown to love under Linux, but have to live without under OpenSolaris unless you compile it?
How up to date are the packages? (Are they more up to date than Debian Stable of Slackware, but not even close to Ubuntu or Fedora?)
What kind of hardware requirements does it seem to need? (Will a 1ghz with 512megs work or do you need more iron for OpenSolaris?)
Have you had any issues using the command line because of the difference in file architecture or the difference in command flags?
How was the install to disk? (Any thing go different than a typical Linux install?)
Do you get StarOffice (with the MSWord macro converter) or just Open Office?

I would be interested in a more complete review, especially since you seem to enjoy using OpenSolaris. I have heard very little in the way of a complete review since Ian came aboard at Sun.

I would imagine that some of the reason that Toshiba would have for choosing OpenSolaris would be because it is a real company that sells software, and has been in the Operating System world for a while now. I think that vendors are still trying to figure out this new world of putting a Unix based operating system on their hardware. They know with Windows, that they call Microsoft, and Microsoft will give them CD's with a license that they can then legally put on a computer and sell. They also know that if Windows breaks that they can tell their users to call Microsoft with their OS questions, and they just have to deal with the hardware questions. Never mind the fact that Microsoft tech support is very expensive, and few people will ever call it, they will just have their geek friend do a reinstall of Windows.

Now Toshiba can do something similar with Open Solaris. If you have a problem call Sun, they can charge you for tech support, and we will support the hardware failures. With Linux this is a bit more difficult. From what I understand Dell actually has staff that do tech support for Ubuntu right, or do they farm it out to the Ubuntu guys? Other distros don't have tech support lines set up. Admittedly, if Toshiba could educate their customers in the use of forums and mailing lists, then they would have all sorts of help, but I don't think Toshiba is thinking out of the box yet. Anyway, might be a step though because OpenSolaris is a step closer to Linux.

[MattKingUSA]

Please don't think that was a review. I stopped reading your comment right before you listed that long list of questions because I knew that the answer to all was most likely no...I was just commenting on how nice it looked. I wouldn't really ever use solaris. It's not Linux. I'm just saying that it kind of puts us to shame in a lot of ways. It's so very together. But Linux is the always the best choice over proprietary.

[Patrick]

I work in a very Solaris centric shop. The admins are playing around with opensolaris but you know what they mostly run at home? BSD, Linux and a few running OSX on their laptops.

[Wally Balljacker]

I did an install on my ThinkPad just for kicks to see how much OpenSolaris has progressed. It's a pleasant-looking environment, I'll give Sun that much, but it really strikes me as being all style with little substance. Despite the shiny theme and wallpaper, there is very little you can do with OpenSolaris out of the box as a typical desktop user. It lacks all multimedia support apart from basic open source codecs like Vorbis and Speex, and there is next to nothing for media playback software in their repository. No Amarok, no MPlayer, no VLC, nothing. They don't even have KDE available for installation. On top of that, there is no clear way of enabling 3rd party repositories. After a little Googling, I came across Blastwave, a community-supported project for getting popular open source software on Solaris and OpenSolaris. I followed the instructions for adding the repository, only to have it error out on me. So much for that.

Performance also lags behind modern Linux distros. Boot time is significantly slower on OpenSolaris than it is on Ubuntu on the same laptop. GNOME is snappier under Ubuntu, and installing software with Synaptic is quicker than using the package manager for OpenSolaris. I installed X-Chat just to test it out, and it probably took about 3 or 4 minutes to go through the whole process of installation, which is ridiculously slow. Maybe that's why they don't offer any useful software, they know their package manager is crap.

Anyway, like I mentioned in my other post, OpenSolaris is neat, it's something to play around with, but it's far from a threat to Linux on the desktop.

[mowestusa]

Thanks Wally for the review. I'm glad I have stayed away. I find more excitement getting something like NetBSD running on hardware if I was looking for something different from Linux. NetBSD at least has a huge repo of files.

[eddie]

They used solaris for all the servers running "Banner" college administration software where I used to work. The version of java on the clients had to be changed either forward or backward depending on what time it was from all the intermittent updates of Banner. The servers would always go down during registration. till they had students doing early registration to lighten the load over a period of time on the servers. I thought banner also had issues, so I do not want to blame it all on solaris. Staff so complained about banner. At least it was more dependable than the windows servers we had before that. The solaris admin was an Apple fanboy and hated linux. I avoided him. Even the Professor of the journalism labs (an apple fan) where mac was used exclusively did not like him. I did whatever he asked, but I tried to avoid him. I really wanted to learn solaris. Oh well.

[MattKingUSA]

I agree, it's pretty but other than that it sucks. But it sure is pretty. And it does take like 3 minutes to boot.

[eddie]

I have not messed with open solaris or even the original Solaris in a while, but when I did an install with the early open Solaris versions, it was slow as a snail. Considering Solaris was intended for servers and not as a gui desktop, I can see some issues there. It would be interesting to run open Solaris without a desktop or just with a minimal one to see how it acts as a server ve linux. Who know it might be one mean machine from that point of view. Solaris does have some neat remote features built in.for system administration.

[doublejoon]

OpenSolaris may not be a great desktop, however as a server:
ZFS -Makes our LVM/Linux software RAID look childhish
Containers - Have been come default with the OS since the first Solaris 10 release
SMF - Replaces Init ( I know we have Upstart but still behind Solaris SMF)
Dtrace - For troubleshooting. ( The closest thing we have is SystemTap )