At the end of work today, I had a fully-functional OpenSolaris machine running under VirtualBox.
I have tried, at various points in time, to keep a Solaris x86 machine around — "But, Mom! It followed me home! Honest!" — but in the end, I always wiped it. That is, if I ever got the installation finished. Solaris has not been an easy installation.
This wasn't real. This was virtual. A virtual ISO sat in a fake CD-ROM drive and filled a phony chunk of memory full of OpenSolaris. I clicked "GO", moved to another desktop and beat my head on Catalyst and MySQL for a little while. Then, I moved back to the desktop and clicked OK, and it was done. I had my first stab at Solaris package management trying to install the "Guest" packages.
First time I sat behind a Solaris box, I was using CDE. Ever use CDE? CDE is the reason people started looking in to window managers. So they could get away from it! OpenSolaris comes with Gnome, and it's nice. Nice like the Gnome that comes with Ubuntu. And they're both Live CDs.
If the OpenSolaris user experience is, within Δ, the Ubuntu user experience, why use OpenSolaris? You want to integrate into a huge Sun environment. You develop in Java or otherwise want to have your Sun-based development environment. You're used to Sun. Or you wish to prove your manhood by grappling with the OS that was the go-to Unix when Linus was in high school.
I almost have a use for the similar XP install on my desktop. I don't really have one for OpenSolaris yet. So, what do I use it for?
Showing posts with label live CDs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label live CDs. Show all posts
2007/11/04
Looking Nevada and feeling Indiana ...
To explain, first....
Solaris is becoming opensolaris, licensed under a Stallman-compliant but Torvalds-grumbly license to keep the coolest parts out of Linux. This process is lead by Ian Murdock, former head of Progeny Linux, whose goal was, in part, making an installer for Debian that didn't suck. Progeny died, Ubuntu make the Live CD, and Murdock went to the LSB and then to Sun, where he's in charge of the process of
The old code base is code-named Nevada, the new code base is code-named Indiana, because that's where Ian lives. And it has a dev release Live CD. And I tried it out.
Years ago, I had a specific Celeron box. It was the only PC I had that had a real ATX motherboard rather than a proprietary Compaq oddball thing. So, when I tested things, I tested them on that one. BeOS wouldn't use the network card, so I didn't stick with BeOS. (Otherwise, Be was so choice. It had speed on a 500MHz chip that I would now barely expect on a 2GHz chip.) Later, I installed Windows .Net 2003 server. Again, no networking. If it couldn't network it was of no use to me.
Now, I have the opensolaris live CD. That specific 500MHz machine has been dead for a year. I tested it on this machine, a Compaq desktop I got from a friend whose company was salvaging old desktops. 2.26GHz. Over four times as fast. That'd fight the image that it's Slowlaris. And it looks good. It got that machine to run 1600x1200 on a screen that Ubuntu Feisty refused to run at more than 1024x768.
But, it couldn't find my NIC. What good is a machine that cannot talk to another machine?
But that's a good thing about a live CD. You can test the hardware and see if it works.
I'll try it on my #1, a Dell GX260, soon. In the mean time, can anyone point me to a FreeBSD live CD?
ETA: It works fine on my work machine, a newer HP/Compaq. I'm writing on it right now. It doesn't to TwinView or Compiz. Which is fine, I guess. It's supposed to work, not look pretty.
The live view, this time, required a login and won't give a gterm. It didn't do either when I tried it before. Odd.
Solaris is becoming opensolaris, licensed under a Stallman-compliant but Torvalds-grumbly license to keep the coolest parts out of Linux. This process is lead by Ian Murdock, former head of Progeny Linux, whose goal was, in part, making an installer for Debian that didn't suck. Progeny died, Ubuntu make the Live CD, and Murdock went to the LSB and then to Sun, where he's in charge of the process of
s/S/opens/. The old code base is code-named Nevada, the new code base is code-named Indiana, because that's where Ian lives. And it has a dev release Live CD. And I tried it out.
Years ago, I had a specific Celeron box. It was the only PC I had that had a real ATX motherboard rather than a proprietary Compaq oddball thing. So, when I tested things, I tested them on that one. BeOS wouldn't use the network card, so I didn't stick with BeOS. (Otherwise, Be was so choice. It had speed on a 500MHz chip that I would now barely expect on a 2GHz chip.) Later, I installed Windows .Net 2003 server. Again, no networking. If it couldn't network it was of no use to me.
Now, I have the opensolaris live CD. That specific 500MHz machine has been dead for a year. I tested it on this machine, a Compaq desktop I got from a friend whose company was salvaging old desktops. 2.26GHz. Over four times as fast. That'd fight the image that it's Slowlaris. And it looks good. It got that machine to run 1600x1200 on a screen that Ubuntu Feisty refused to run at more than 1024x768.
But, it couldn't find my NIC. What good is a machine that cannot talk to another machine?
But that's a good thing about a live CD. You can test the hardware and see if it works.
I'll try it on my #1, a Dell GX260, soon. In the mean time, can anyone point me to a FreeBSD live CD?
ETA: It works fine on my work machine, a newer HP/Compaq. I'm writing on it right now. It doesn't to TwinView or Compiz. Which is fine, I guess. It's supposed to work, not look pretty.
The live view, this time, required a login and won't give a gterm. It didn't do either when I tried it before. Odd.
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