OpenSolaris was released a few days ago and I took it for a test drive after work. I've been meaning to write about it but work has been keeping me very busy lately. Before I go into details, I'll summarize what Sun is doing with OpenSolaris. They are creating a distribution targeted for desktop use (at least for now) that will have the latest and greatest software, released twice per year. Servers will still use the old Solaris, who's release cycle is 3+ years. The new distribution has a completely rewritten installer and boots into a working desktop off of a Live CD (like Ubuntu). The old package management system has been enhanced or replaced by Image Packaging System (IPS) which is very much like Debian's apt, but is tightly integrated with ZFS features such as snapshots. IPS can also be used to install packages on other OS's such as Windows.

The Good:

• Everything works out of the box. Sun has added a lot more driver support, targeting the laptop audience. I'm running it on a Sun Ultra 24 workstation, but even this had poor driver support in previous versions of Solaris. OpenSolaris boots with full 3D accellerated graphics support, sound, network, etc.
• Compiz support works right off of the Live CD. Turn it on from System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects. Compiz adds huge wow factor and this is the first time I've been able to see it working on any of my own computers. The reason it didn't work on other computers with Linux is because they have ATI cards which has poor Linux support. At least my ATI cards have poor linux support.
• The Package Manager GUI is very much like Synaptic Package Manager in Debian and Ubuntu. I had no issues at all with it, and was able to install a bunch of programs I wanted easily. I haven't tried uninstalling packages yet, but so far I'm impressed. Note that it refreshes the list with each key press, and that is very slow on the LiveCD. It runs fine when installed on your hard drive. A graphical package manager was missing in previous builds of OpenSolaris, and was a significant usability issue for many people. I like being able to click categories and browse packages, or type keywords and get all kinds of information. I'm sure there is good command line support for it, but I haven't read the man pages yet.
• Built in support to enable remote control using VNC. It even has a feature (configurable) that asks me if I want to allow the incoming connection access whenever they connect. This might be a Gnome feature, but it's still nice to have working out of the box.
• Able to browse windows network out of the box. Again this might be a Gnome feature, but I like that it works out of the box.

The bad (but not that bad):

• Had to install Flash 9 player myself, but it was easy to do. Sun used to distribute Flash 7 or 9 with other versions of Solaris. I wonder why they can't do that with this one? Maybe Adobe said no after Sun announced JavaFX? :)
• When I right clicked a folder and selected "Share", it offered NFS but not Samba in the dropdown list. Ubuntu offers both, even if Samba is not installed. If you select Samba, then it asks if you'd like to install the package. Click yes, it installs it, then you can use it right away. I forget when and where you configure Sabma.
• No CUPS support out of box or even CUPS packages. This is a huge issue for me. I bought Ä… specific Xerox multifunction printer for the Solaris support using CUPS. When I was using Solaris Express Developer Edition, I installed CUPS from sunfreeware.com and got the printer working. I highly recommend Sun makes CUPS a supported package in their repo. One thing I noticed is that CUPS support on Solaris Express Developer Edition was not as nice as Ubuntu's CUPS support. In Ubuntu it was integrated in the Printers Manager, like any other printer support. When you install CUPS on Solaris, you have to use some web based app to manage it. If you want to change some settings when printing a specific document, you have to do that from the web app instead of from a print dialog. It wasn't like that in Ubuntu.
• Many packages have no description or very little detail. I remember reading somewhere that there is still a lot of work to do building up the packages repo. They won't be porting all of the existing packages over to IPS as-is, there will be a lot of splitting things to be fine grained. I really like that. I wonder if Sun will one day hire the guys from sunfreeware and BlastWave to build up and manage their packages repo?
• The Subversion package has a dependency on Apache. I don't want Apache, I just want a command line subversion client for NetBeans and IntelliJ IDEA.
• The SUNWgnome-media-mp3 package was not installed by default. I installed it, but still can't play MP3's.
• Only the old version of NetBeans has a package (6.0.1). NetBeans 6.1 isn't there. I ended up downloading the binary installer, which comes with GlassFish and Tomcat.
• The JDK and JRE 6 update 4 are available as packages, but not update 6. Also, Java is not installed by default.
• Thunderbird comes with old Lightning plugin. To be fair, the more usable v0.8 Lightning plugin was only recently released.
• My home directory is /export/home/ryan instead of /home/ryan. It is normal for Solaris to put home directories in /export/home because you're supposed to use the automount program to mount your home directory the first time you try to access it. You can set it up so that users' home directories are transparently on an NFS share and mounted to /home. I would have expected OpenSolaris to have /export/home/ryan automount to /home/ryan.
• Services window doesn't have something for me to type in keywords to narrow down the list. It would also be nice if it looked more like the Windows Services screen where there are start/stop/disable buttons, and the current state of each service is shown. This services screen works fine, it's just not what I'm used to. I doubt the Solaris guys want it to look like the Windows Services screen, but I do.
• I installed the postgres package, but where is it? How can I start it? It's not in services window (SMF). After installing pgAdminIII, it's not pre-configured for the local server.
• No remote desktop/vnc client by default. I installed the SUNWrdesktop package, but no icon in Gnome. I'm looking for the GUI tool that I use in Ubuntu. I suspect that tool is just a front end for rdesktop, which is pretty easy to use from command line anyway. I tried it with Terminal Server (Remote Desktop) and VNC. Just remember that CTRL-ALT-ENTER is how you get out of full screen mode! Next I checked the SUNWgnome-remote-desktop package, and it is already installed. I don't see it in my Applications menu.
• After my first session I logged out then back in. Compiz was no longer running. I turned it back on, logged out, then back in. While it was still loading "The panel" (gnome box in center of screen) I tried to rotate the cube. It worked, but only one desktop was visible in the cube, and it seemed to be stuck saying "loading the panel". My desktop icons were not visible. I opened gedit to see if I could do -anything- with the computer. It opened. I couldn't log out of Gnome (it did nothing). The second time I hovered my mouse over the logut button (I added it to Gnome panel) it seemed to have clicked it for me. I couldn't move the mouse anymore and gedit was asking if I wanted to save. I pressed CTRL-S to save, and it logged me out. I logged back in and it was fine. I haven't had this happen since, but I have had Compiz magically get turned off when I log out a few times.
• When I turned system event sounds on, none of the sound files were configured right. At least when I clicked play, no sound. When I selected real sound files, still no sound when I clicked play. I logged out/in, and no login or logout sounds. I get sounds for some events though, such as clicking Gnome Panel icons. Weird.
• At some point my keyboard characters got screwed up. I couldn't type apostrophe, and some some letters were wrong. This happens to me on Windows Vista too. Earlier I had removed some accessibility or language selection thing from Gnome panel, and it became stuck on my desktop instead. I could not get it to close. I had to go into its settings and tell it that I don't want to use it. Now that it's closed, I don't know how to get it back so that I can check if I have the right keyboard settings or not.

I have had some sporadic issues, but for the most part I would say OpenSolaris is very usable and a pleasure to work with compared to the previous versions. If I can ever have a night to myself, I will be setting this up as my primary Java development computer. It will have IntelliJ IDEA 7, NetBeans 6.1, GlassFish V2 and PostgreSQL.

I'm wondering how updates will work. Will I have to pay Sun to use an update center? Will IPS replace that? Will it be free for all packages?