Today I have decided to give a try to open Solaris 08.11 on my old notebook with 734M RAM and and Pentium M CPU. It is a 4 years old computer. I am writing this blog on my newly installed open solaris machine.
My previous experience with Open Solaris was 1 yeara ago and I stopped using it in a few days due to various problems with wifi, sound and general system stability. It somehow stop booting from time to time and fall back to maintenance console after boot-up.
I have downloaded bootable cd through torrent, and I am still seeding it. Booting from bootable cd was very easy, only questions asked were which language to use and keyboard layout. After that I decided to install by using the desktop icon placed for this purpose. Again it was very easy, only critical question is which partition to use.
Open Solaris comes with a automatic wifi configuration application. Although it successfully found my network it somehow could not get an IP address from my ADSL router. So I have switched to manual network configuration.
1) added id address and hosname to /etc/hosts
192.168.1.187 jazz
2) added ip address to /etc/hostname.iwi0 (iwi0 is name of my network interface, yours may be different)
192.168.1.187
3) added open dns name servers to /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220
4) added dns option for hostname resolution to /etc/nsswitch.conf by changing following lines
hosts: files dns
ipnodes: files dns
Although gnome volume control applet is added there were no sound. So I have downloaded Open Sound system. Installed it using pkgadd -d oss-solaris-v4.1-1051-i386.pkg and rebooted (there is no package for v5). After reboot volume control applet is gone and there were no sound either. I have reinstalled the application. Tested it osstest and sound works :)
I have visited youtube and there were no flash player installed :( I have downloaded flash player for solaris from Adobe site and put it in /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/ folder. After restarting firefox flash 9 was working fine :)
Java 6 update 10 and plugin for firefox were already installed. Now I am installing RTSJ 2.1 90 days evaluation version.
The biggest thing about open solaris is ZFS. I am using zfs-fuse on my Ubuntu machine. Although it works perfectly I want to try a native ZFS implementation. This was the reason I am trying opensolaris from time to time. ZFS already saved my home folder several times and I can not consider storing my files in any other file system. Open Solaris also contains an application called "Time Slider" which takes automatic zfs snapshots from time to time. With zfs-fuse you can not use zfs on you root partition but open solaris uses zfs on root partition.
One little thing, I could not get compiz running in my old notebook with Intel GMA 950 onboard card, although I haven't tried much yet.
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