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OpenSolaris Still Shines

With all the gloom-and-doom about Sun in the air, it almost went unnoticed that they have a new rev of OpenSolaris out in the wild. I took a quick end-user-experience peek.

The good: Solaris itself -- it's a solid platform, and many big-name open source apps run on top of it (Firefox, etc). The core fonts in GNOME also look decent -- about on a par with the Linux equivalents, although this is something easily changed so I shouldn't get hung up about it. More important: the VirtualBox guest utilities worked perfectly -- as well they ought to, since that's also a Sun product.

Bad: No out-of-the-box drivers are available for the AC97 audio controller -- which is, you know, only probably one of the most popular audio chipsets in the world. That meant no sound on two of the machines I tried it out on -- at least not by default. There is a community-submitted AC97 support tip, though.

Worst: Booting is impossibly slow. I'm amazed that it takes as long as it does -- minutes on end -- to get to a working desktop. (It's not as if the disk is churning during most of the boot process, either. What's it doing?)

What comes to mind most readily, though, is not what Sun would be doing with Solaris -- but rather, what a third party with greater ambitions might do with it. Canonical, for instance: what if they started experimenting with an Ubuntu derivate that used Solaris as its bedrock instead of Linux? They'd benefit from having a much stabler and industrial-strength base, and still be able to deploy all of the userland software we know and love. Still gotta do something about that boot time, though.

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