Hah - my fiancee and I recently played with Solaris CE/OpenSolaris for
x86. It was a horrible experience. First we tried the DVD installer,
since we didn't want to mess around shuffling CDs. The installer was
pretty nice, with the exception of the parts that actually did things.
The partitioning tool was particularly craptastic. For one thing,
Solaris apparently refuses to install on an extended logical
partition. This is somewhat annoying, as we'd set aside a 15G
extended partition specifically for it. Also, it detected that we had
linux partitions on the machine, and strongly recommended we wipe them
out before installing Solaris. So, we rebooted into GNU/Linux, did
some partition shuffling with gparted and friends, and booted the
install DVD again for a second try. This time, we discovered that the
provided partitioning tool wouldn't let us create more than one
partition of the type Solaris uses. And, surprise, Solaris uses the
same partition type that GNU/Linux uses for swap! So, we had to
relabel the swap partition as a DOS partition (the tool had very few
options for partition types, along the lines of DOS, Solaris, and
maybe one more) in order to have the empty partition labeled as a
Solaris partition. So, we finally had a partition on which we could
start installing; we made slices for the filesystems, answered a few
hardware questions, and we were on to the actual software
installation.
The package chooser was nearly as impressive as the disk utility.
First and most annoying, the packages were listed in some arbitrary,
non-alphabetical order, in order to offer installers the enjoyment of
scrolling up and down the entire list to find, say, a C compiler.
Second of all, most of the packages had very poor descriptions, along
the lines of:
* jwxSUNW46: binary files for jwxSUNW46
* jwxSUNW46-lib-dev: lib-dev files for jwxSUNW46
(nowhere an explanation of what jwxSUNW46 was, or why we
would/wouldn't want it, or if anything depended on it, or even if it
was recommended for installation)
Third, there was *no* interactive dependency resolution. For example,
we unmarked apache, jakarta, and tomcat, because we had no intention
of running a webserver, let alone jsp/etc. We got no warnings or
anything of the sort. When we were done selecting and unselecting
packages, we pressed next to go on. Lo! Behold! A giant list of
things that could not be installed because the things they depended on
were not selected! So, we had to go back, click packages on and off,
try again, read the resulting messages, repeat repeat repeat repeat
repeat. Finally we got a magical combination of packages that would
let us continue with the installation, and continue we did.
We let the package installer churn overnight, and were able to finish
the installation without further hitches. It did prompt us for an
optional Solaris Companion Software disc, which we didn't have and
hadn't even seen a link for, so we chose "skip." The Solaris
installer overrode our existing grub menu, but we had expected that.
At least it had a pretty Finally, we got the pretty Solaris logon
screen (on one monitor - the other was a pretty canvas of random
garbage).
We logged in, chose Sun Java Desktop(GNOME) as our desktop
environment, and within a few seconds were sitting in front of what
looked like a Windows 2000 desktop. One thing I noticed is that many
of the standard applications' menu items had been renamed. For
example, instead of "Mozilla" and "The Gimp," we had "Web Browser" and
"Image Editor."
Tosha had a small C program to write for class, so she figured she may
as well do it in Solaris now that we'd gotten it running. We soon
found out, there was no gcc(!) - even though we selected it during the
installation. We checked the docs and checked our paths, and it just
wasn't there. During the course of our search, we noticed a *lot* of
the software we'd marked for installation wasn't there - apparently,
most of the common free software available for selection inside the
installer is on the Companion CD. Fine. Next she tried the Sun C
compiler, which was installed. First, we had to do a lot of monkeying
with paths, because cc was not in the default path - in fact, very few
things were in the default path. Most of the useful software was
somewhere in the /opt tree. Apparently, however, it was not installed
correctly, because it consistently gave a very strange link error
which had nothing to do with the code being compiled. Once again, we
dug through docs, but found nothing of much relevance or help. Next,
we tried downloading a binary of gcc from sunfreeware.com. We quickly
ran into dependency issues and gave up. We decided we must have
gotten a corrupted install - surely nothing would ship with that many
things missing and broken. (And don't call me Shirley!)
We decided to reinstall. This time we got the CD install images, and
were able to find a Companion CD image that seemed to correspond with
them. We ran the install again, and everything seemed fine for the
first CD. Although the checksums matched, the installer refused to
see any of the subsequent discs. But we'd already overwritten the
previous install. Joy!
Hopefully the third time was going to be the charm. We installed from
the DVD again. When the time came to insert the Companion CD, the
installer wouldn't recognize it. We hit skip again, let the install
finish without it, mounted the CD, and ran the CD's installer from
there. This finally let us get some decent (if ancient) software
installed. Hooray, gcc 2.95!
Since we had a working C compiler, we decided to install Galeon,
Tosha's browser of choice. This required us to get much newer
versions of the GTK+ libraries than the ones that had been installed.
After chasing down all the requisites (glib, atk, pango, ...), we
began compiling them. Unfortunately, no matter what we did, we were
unable to get the GTK+ configure script to see that pango was
installed, even by passing it the path. While it was perhaps not
Solaris's fault that we couldn't build GTK+, the fact that there was
only a poor selection of ancient software available for install
certainly was, and this was the last straw for us. For crying out
loud, we could have installed Slackware 8 and had the same currency of
software, except it would have worked out of the box without a lot of
futzing. We never got around to actually looking at or building the
actual OpenSolaris source, because we were hoping for a usable system
first. If you've actually read down this far, go get yourself a
cookie; you've earned it.
So, as you may be able to guess, our impression of OpenSolaris: not impressed.
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