Fellow Solaris Enthusiasts, I've recently been taking OpenSolaris for a test drive under VMWare. I've been using Linux for quite a while but am considering switching to something else. Solaris is one of the OSes I'm considering. But, I have a few questions. Please feel free to direct me to the appropriate mailing lists/documentation.
First, let me give a little info on my computer history/experience. Forgive me if I ramble a bit. During my brief stay in college in the late '80s I got my first taste of real operating systems. Up to that point I had only used PCs, which in those days were mostly DOS based. In college the main system new computer science students used was a VAX 11/750 running VMS. I was hooked. I even started working as a volunteer operator in the computer center. While there I also got some very brief hands on experience with a couple of Unix systems, a Honeywell Bull and ... a Sun SPARC Workstation. Unfortunately I dropped out of college part way through my second semester. After using VMS, and Unix briefly, DOS on a home PC just wasn't quite that interesting. Then, along came Windows. Things were going down hill. Then, one day I heard about Linux. I was thrilled. I started using Slackware Linux in the 1.xx kernel days. As other Linux distributions came out I tried them. I used Mandrake for a few years. And, for the last few years I've been using Gentoo. Back when I was using Mandrake I heard that Solaris was available for free. I was ecstatic. I immediately downloaded and burnt the install CD images. At the time I had a pair of older Pentium MMX 200 boxes. I tried installing Solaris on one of the boxes. It kept failing. A little research indicated a chip in the IDE controllers on the motherboards I had was incompatible with Solaris. Oh well, I stuck with Linux. I now have a more modern box that I've been running Gentoo Linux on. But lately I've been considering switching to something else. I think one of Linux's greatest strengths is also one of it's biggest weaknesses - there are too many Linux distributions available. Many use different package managers and most software vendors only want to support a few distributions. And, usually the distributions they want to support are the ones I try to avoid. After using Mandrake for a few years I've decided to stay away from all rpm based distributions. So, thanks to VMWare I've been trying out other options. I'm running FreeBSD on my web/mail server so I've seriously considered switching my desktop PC to FreeBSD. And, as I mentioned, I've also been taking Solaris for a spin. My first concern with Solaris is that it doesn't have virtual consoles. With Linux and FreeBSD I do as much as I can via virtual text consoles and only use X when needed. I have found the virtual console project on OpenSolaris.org. The Solaris I installed recently under VMWare is 5.11 snv_74, but the latest vconsole bfu update available on the project's download page is based on build 66. Will that work with later Solaris builds? I tried installing it and it partially worked. There were some errors while booting. I think they were something along the lines of undefined symbols in some of the kernel modules. Once booted I was able to switch from X to virtual consoles and back again. But, if I tried to run "full screen" applications, such as Alpine, via the virtual consoles the display was corrupted. It looked like perhaps it thought the screen was larger than it really was. An stty -a on the main console reported the screen size as 0x0. On the other consoles it reported the screen size as 25x80. I'm not sure if the display problems are related to a known bug in the vconsole code itself or if perhaps it's because I tried using the vconsole build 66 bfu archive to update a snv_74 based system. I suspect there's a good chance the problem is related to my lack of bfu understanding. Speaking of bfu, is that the preferred way to update Solaris systems? If so, I'm glad I'm only running Solaris under VMWare, and not depending on it as my main OS. Thanks to VMWare snapshots I backed out my vconsole install attempt and tried updating my system with bfu to get a better feel for it. I tried installing the "current" bfu archive on top of my snv_74 system and ended up with a non-bootable system. It would start to boot, display some errors, then reboot. I didn't have time to make note of the exact error messages before it rebooted. I backed out that attempt, once again thanks to VMWare snapshots, and tried updating my system from snv_74 to snv_75, which was successful. Then, I tried updating from snv_75 to snv_76 and ended up with the same type of boot problem. So, for the moment, I'm running snv_75. How would one recover from such a failed upgrade attempt on a "real" system? Which brings me to another concern. One of the things that appealed to me about Solaris was that there's not umpteen distributions available, like Linux. But, since I've started investigating Solaris I've discovered the existence of Nexenta and have also heard of the Indiana project. Is Solaris trying to head down the same road Linux did? I've tried out Nexenta under VMWare and while there are many things I like about it it just doesn't feel like a true Solaris system. Kevin http://www.RawFedDogs.net http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org Bruceville, TX Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes. Longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla!!! _______________________________________________ opensolaris-help mailing list [email protected]
