Opensolaris on my system :-)

    Hey folks, It was a really thrilling experience…. I installed the Sun Microsystems’ Opensolaris on my     system. The installation went well. The interesting thing in the installation was that I didnt have a proper knowledge in the installation of solaris… Linux , I have done and can manage… But solaris….. this was the first time…. It took almost 1 hr and 20min to install and the great Solaris login screen came up.

I have installed opensolaris previously, but at my college in a system at my favourite lab and with the help of a few friends and seniors. This time I did it all alone…. even there was no one to consult as it was over 12’o clock in the night and i didn’t want to didturn my friends…. The installation process was text based… ( We need over 400 MB of RAM for a graphical installation and my good old system has just 256 MB). Then installation went well untill it came to disk partition. Previously, expecting some disaster, I had disconnected my primary master drive and only the primary slave was on. In that too, i had made a backup of important data and kept it in a CD. Then, the installation started. And ofcourse, when I logged back to the stupid windows, I was sure that the slave was entirely gone…. inspite of me allocating only 15 GB that was already used up by an old version of ubuntu. Anywayz… It was windoze that I lost and I am least bothered about it.

The opensolaris was very nice to use and it was the first time on my system. The cool features that I found in it were that the GNOME is really good and far better than the one in GNU/Linux.Dtrace was really excellent and great. Will sit and learn more of it soon. It too has python, perl, java apart from the good old C language. Then, the important thing to be noted is that the GRUB is a modified one and hence detecs UFS. The normal GNU/Linux GRUB cannot detect UFS.

I still have a list of problems with the solaris. But, I think that is because I am not used to it. Since I had been using Debian GNU/Linux all these time, I am forced to use those commands here. Fortunately, both being UNIX based, most of the commands work. The major problem that I faced was that opensolaris doesnot have emacs 🙁 . It is the one editor that I cherish and I have not even opened vi or vim once…. Will either have to learn vim or install emacs from the source. The other problems were that I was unable to connect to the Internet through my broadband modem. I use a ethernet card and opensolaris says it as rtls0 device.  Hope will configure it soon.Also, I feel there is a bug in lock screen option, either in my copy or in opensolaris itself.

But on the whole, it was a nice experince to install and use an OS that was until recently a server side OS. Will work more on opensolaris these days and will try to spread the message. Hope soon the people of the world dump M$ and turn to GNU/Linux and Opensolaris