Re:Wow. OpenSolaris is a rough ride. (Score 3, Informative)

Would be interested if you elaborated a bit on the problems you have experienced. From your perspective and from your users perspective. This is not a, I'm going to argue with you post, but rather a request for more detail - as what you have to say sounds interesting.

I used opensolaris 2008.05 for a month and stopped as it was too rough round the edges to use day to day. But it got most of my hardware just fine. Only sound was missing and OSS handled that just fine.

I just upgraded to 2008.11 RC1 - snv-101a - and find it a whole different experience. I have one app, which runs on linux only at the moment, and I run that on virtual box, which is a breeze to install and configure in seamless mode after the guest os additions are installed.

Mplayer, with all its codecs, does the video, but is inconvenient compared to totem, which is useless as it has no day to day codecs.

My video card is an old ati 2400HD pro card. Sun and ati don't have a relationship so I use the stock xorg support which works, though my initial login screen always ends up odd no matter how I twiddle xorg.conf. The desktop and gnome come up just fine.

The perl upgrade from 5.6.1 to 5.8.4 broke CPAN and I can't fix it - a problem for me which I have to report and hope will be fixed in the the next RC.

Gnome theme changes don't recognize custom icons. Evolution won't play a wav file when mail arrives; but it does beep.

The system clock is set to zulu by ubuntu and I was unable to set the time within opensolaris after the upgrade.

My permissions from 2008.05 didn't migrate. It was a bit of work to figure out how to set that right.

On the way I got to see suns role based access control in its Gnome user and groups configuration implementation and found it much more accessible then the sel-linux approach.

Openoffice 3 and firefox 3.03 complete my story. Both are fine, though I did tweak the firefox ui through about:config for better font rendering. I think there is freetype issue here.

Other then that it just works and works so well that I'm switching to it for day to day work.

My system is a vanilla desktop system built - and rebuilt - over the years from parts from fry.

PC power and cooling 600 watt power supply
core 2 duo 6550
2 GB kingston ddr-800 ram
ati hd 2400 pro
maxtor ide drive
intel/realtec motherboard hd audio
various usb etc which all work
kds monitor - a problem as xorg doesn't seem to figure out its capabilities correctly
memorex dvd -
broke after 6 months of limited usage - tech support - doesn't - "as there are too many linux versions to support" - so no rma for a broken drive still under warantee - stay away from memorex.

Thats what my hardware looks like.

I connect to the net through a vonage router which acts as a firewall and dhcp server. The modem is a cable modem. I've had no connectivity problems. My phone runs via Vonage VOIP.

Printer is an old hp 3200se which works via cups.

Current versions of Azuereus don't work because it has dependencies on eclipse which opensolaris doesn't support.

I think this will likely continue to be true for a while as eclipse is IBM and netbeans is Sun (opensolaris) and well, Sun and IBM have a disfuntional relationship history.

There is an earlier version of azureus that may work, but I haven't tried that yet.

The linux app that doesn't work on opensolaris and which reqiuires virtual box/ubuntu to run - is an application based/built on mozilla.

In theory it should recompile without problems on opensolaris, but in practice it hasn't.

However, compiling a mozilla app is a little like building emacs - they are separate words unto themselves; and I am not knowledgeable about building mozila apps.

I will contact the developers. In theory I just have configuration problems for the compile - in practice, it may be opensolaris has some work to do on what gets installed in their gcc environment.

So thats how things are working for me.

Time will tell.