Saturday, May 10, 2008

Finally OpenSolaris Installed

Finally, after 4 attempts, I got a half way decent install of Solaris. My previous attempts included installing Solaris Express Developer Edition on VMware Server 1.0.4 and VirtualBox 1.5. Both had major issues but I had the best luck with VMware Server, it just took like 15 minutes to boot and I couldn't install vmware tools. So at JavaOne 08 they announced http://www.opensolaris.com with the version 2008.05. So I thought I would give it a try and their install documentation seemed very thorough (see how to install on virtualbox). Unfortunately, installing this in virtualbox did not work (would't boot) and so I decided to give it one more shot on VMware Server and I guess I got lucky because it actually worked to my surprise. And it actually boots rather fast compared to my previous experience with solaris.

Since it uses GNOME it reminded me a lot of my ubuntu system. I was even able to successfully install vmware-tools which I got really excited about because I would have bet against this previously. Compiz is installed by default but I was unable to change the settings yet (it kept rebooting for some reason). Maybe it's because I haven't enable the nvida drivers yet; which was also a surprise that the nvida drivers where already installed.

Here are some features compared to Linux. I am not a file system guru but ZFS sounds interesting.

Anyways so far so good. I do miss sudo. I am now able to start working efficiently on providing hudson as a package in solaris. I am assuming that once I get done the below search will actually return a result (me <-- crossing my fingers).

3 comments:

Mine said...

Hi James. I am another suffering user trying to install OpenSolaris 2008.5 on my VMWare Server console and ,so far, could not make...
Do you mind letting me know which options and selections you choose to make it work?
I am very exited about giving a try to OpenSolaris and , so far I have not been able to.
thank you very much. Raul

Matt Pawelski said...

Hi guys, I would strongly recommend checking out VMware Server 2.0 Beta (Release Candidate 1). The administration panel runs as a Tomcat-powered web application with a special web browser plug-in for the console. The latency of the transmission of the GUI desktop is amazing.

And... more in the scope of this discussion, OpenSolaris install is cake.

Daniel Escasa said...

Use pfexec in place of sudo.