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).