On 21/02/2010 12:02, George Silviu Enea wrote: > Hi there to all, dear friends! > > I`m new to OpenSolaris, and in the last 2 years I left Windows and tried > several Linux distributions. At the moment I`m using openSUSE 11.3 and I love > it, but... something`s missing... I didn`t found the perfect OS... yet... > > Came to know about OpenSolaris... I installed it, but everything seems to be > hard... the sound does not work.. cannot find any new updates... I used > OpenSolaris 2009.06 > > But the reason I`m opening this thread is to ask which are the reasons for > using OpenSolaris, and what OpenSolaris offers for a everyday desktop user > that Linux or Windows does not offer... I enjoy OpenSolaris... but everything > seems to be so difficult for me to do (install programs for example). I > really want to know all the benefits it is offering, and if there is a reason > to pass all this difficulties... > > Please give me some reason, and I`ll use OpenSolaris, I`ll learn how works > and I`ll spread the word about it here in my country. > > Thank you so so much!!! Greatly appreciate it! > Hi George.
I don't think OpenSolaris is intended only for server usage. OpenSolaris is an interesting alternative to Linux, since it's a different Unix implementation, with significant kernel differences (see http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+advocacy/solaris-linux-freebsd for some pointers what to read about it). Most users though are probably attracted by features like modern ZFS filesystem, DTrace, virtualization capabilities and others. OpenSolaris is actually pretty pleasant as a desktop and the default Gnome theme "Nimbus" has a nice professional look'n'feel (note that KDE is also available for OpenSolaris, but it doesn't come from default repository. See http://solaris.bionicmutton.org/ if you prefer KDE). But since OpenSolaris is relatively young (not as an OS in general, since it has historic roots going back to System V and BSD, but as a full featured distribution), there are still some rough edges and lesser amount of available prebuilt programs, when comparing with some popular Linux distros like Debian etc. The default "release" repository ( http://pkg.opensolaris.org/release ) provides updates when a new milestone release comes out (approximately twice a year), however you can switch to development repository ( http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev ) which will update your system with ongoing builds (the current one being snv_133) approx. twice a month (See http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+on/schedule which shows how development builds correspond to milestone ones). Using the dev repo is the only free option so far if you want to get timely updates including security and bug fixes. (See for example http://blogs.sun.com/observatory/entry/correctly_setting_up_the_development for setup details). Additional ported programs can be found in contrib and extra repositories: http://pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib and https://pkg.sun.com/opensolaris/extra (the later requires registration to obtain a certificate). These repos are somewhat lacking multimedia packages. Fortunately there are very good community efforts like http://solaris.homeunix.com/ with useful packages which make your OpenSolaris into usable multimedia desktop. I hope this will make your experience with OpenSolaris more interesting. Regards, Hillel.
