Review of Solaris 2008.11

If you are like me who enjoys testing various operating systems, then you must have heard about Solaris. Solaris is an industrial-grade server operating system published by Sun Microsystems. I've always wanted to test drive Solaris but I don't have the resources to do so, up still recently when Sun placed Solaris under open source. Now I can test drive the system.

I tried downloading the latest Solaris version that comes under the name OpenSolaris 2008.11. Here are my notes:

Desktop

Solaris now sports a pretty GNOME desktop interface. So if you are an old Linux hand like me, you will feel at home with the graphical user interface.



RAM


Solaris 2008.11 requires a huge memory to effectively install it. On my machine, it required 512MB of RAM. Anything lower, the system will not install.


Home Directory


To my surprise, the user's home directory is not located in "/home" unlike in all distributions of Linux. It is located in "/export/home".


User Name


Solaris still does not support long usernames. So you will have to make do with an 8-letter username.


Internet Browser


The default Internet browser is Mozilla Firefox. However, you cannot view "youtube" since flash has to be manually installed. Fortunately, there is a flash player available for Solaris which you can download from www.adobe.com.

To install the flash player, download and unpack the flash player package (flash_player_10_solaris_x86.tar.bz2). The package only contains one file (libflashplayer.so) and does not contain any instructions on how to install it. So I tried experimenting with it given my knowledge of Firefox. Here is what I did:

a) I copied the file (libflashplayer.so) to the Firefox plugin directory at "/usr/lib/firefox/plugins"
b) Then, I restarted Firefox.

I went immediately to youtube to test if the flash player will work. To my delight, it did!


Office Suite


OpenOffice is not part of the installer CD. But my guess is, it can easily be installed since it is published by Sun Microsystems.



Network Card


Solaris 2008.11 still got limited network card support unlike Linux. I tried installing it on three other desktops, it did not work. There was no driver support for the network card.


Sound


On all three desktops and 1 laptop I installed Solaris 2008.11 on, none of the built-in sound card was supported. I did not investigate any further as all distributions of Linux do not have problems with the sound card on all of those machines. My guess is, Solaris 2008.11 still needs some polishing in terms of its driver support.