Solaris / OpenSolarisThis forum is for the discussion of Solaris, OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, and illumos.
General Sun, SunOS and Sparc related questions also go here. Any Solaris fork or distribution is welcome.
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Distribution: Mepis and Fedora, also Mandrake and SuSE PC-BSD Mint Solaris 11 express
Posts: 385
Rep:
Oh, so my image is older I guess. When I tried solaris, I couldn't get all the media codecs to work. My printer wasn't detected. Sound only worked for online videos like youtube (which looked great BTW)
Functionality in linux which I took for granted in pcbsd & linux just wasn't there.
Also, no Bluetooth.
As a quick O/S for web surfing, it was great. It just didn't play nice (or at all) with my other stuff.
Still, I might try a newer image to see if there is any improvement.
Currently, I'm running Linux Mint as my primary system & pcbsd on an external hard drive.
Distribution: OpenSUSE 13.2 64bit-Gnome on ASUS U52F
Posts: 1,444
Rep:
I am using OpenIndina which is binary compatible with Solaris. For what I see this software aim to be a SERVER software, which also can work as desktop but their main thing is enterprise environment. So if you want to use it keep that in mind.
I am using the Gnome 2 desktop, and so far I have been able to upgrade firefox and thunderbird both to version 15.0.1. I haven been able to make flashplayer work, and I havent been succeful at playing Mp3 nor videos I have storage in my hard drive. I am using VLC player
I do recomment OpenIndiana though,if you want to learn it.
ZFS file system seems to be working good and fast in my single processor Pentium M laptop
Distribution: OpenSUSE 13.2 64bit-Gnome on ASUS U52F
Posts: 1,444
Rep:
Thank you for pointing that out. I meant OpenIndiana.
I have a close source printer (Kodak ESP C310) So it is not going to work with OpenIndiana, sound is fine didnt need to do anything to get it working, I cant play any videos or mp3 because the codecs arent working. I have VLC installed but no working at the moment.
If you have the guide for enabling solaris 11 express repos I would like to try that.
I'm going to chime in and agree with TroN-0074. While Solaris is accessible for hobbyists, it is geared for enterprise users with high-end equipment and an IT staff. I have heard good things about OpenIndiana which offers many of the same technologies, and may be more approachable for a hobbyist. BSD has many of them as well, though I am only personally familiar with the Solaris versions.
I have a very low-end x86 running Solaris 11 with several zones, ZFS and somewhat complex virtual networking. There is a significant learning curve, but it is well worth the effort if you work for a company that relies on Solaris or plan to. Just keep in mind that Solaris 11 is not Linux and knowledge of one will not map directly to the other. - What I am getting around to is that it can be installed on some low-end machines (my testing rig cost about $600 retail), but OpenIndiana may be a better choice if you are just playing around.
So, learning Solaris:
* The documentation on Oracle Technology Network (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/) is excellent and there are several tutorials out there. Check out "http://www.solarisinternals.com" as it makes a nice companion to the official documentation. There is a lot of reading involved, that and having a machine to try things out on. The way I learned was by building the base machine and then creating zones to handle specific purposes. Build - test - Rebuild in a different way.
* By all means use VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/) for your environment starting out, it removes many of the hardware concerns from the equation. If you decide to go deeper, look for hardware that is known to be supported. There are a lot of SPARC and enterprise-grade x86 machines on the used equipment market.
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