Is Solaris suited as a small and fast home server? I will be running it on a desktop PC (usually no monitor, mouse or keyboard attached) with 1,33 GHz AMD processor and 512 MB RAM. It will function mostly as backup storage and simple web/FTP/SSH server.

Is it easy to manage packages on Solaris? I need Apache, PHP 4 or 5, Python, an FTP server and an SSH server. Will these be incredibly hard to get working?

What should I choose - Solaris or OpenSolaris?

Please help me decide whether or not to give Solaris/OpenSolaris a try.

- Per

Solaris is certainly suited to these needs, especially as a file-server with a ZFS backend which would give you unique features.

Package management is probably more complicated than what you are used to, but there is are efforts to increase its ease of use. The simpler for you would be to use blastwave's packages and pkg-get.

The choice isn't between Solaris and OpenSolaris as the former is the offical O/S name while the latter is (currently) only Open Source code and the community around it.

Solaris Express would likely be the best distribution for you to install if you don't care reinstalling/upgrading the whole O/S to keep the system up to date while Solaris 10 latest update would be better if you want a supported distribution with security (free) and other patches available.