Tuesday 11 November 2008

OpenSolaris Once Again

Well, just for the heck of it I'm posting this from a computer running OpenSolaris - a Dell M90 laptop. It's certainly a lot more polished than the last time I tried a "community express" edition, everything pretty much worked out of the box - including wpa protected wifi with the wpi driver which wasn't working at all last time a tried (a long while back now.) Power management seems improved too, though I've not tried to suspend to disk or anything yet.
It's kind of neat to be able to tinker with Solaris this way at home. Tinkering is really all it is though I think, though maybe I'll find a real reason to run it instead of a linux distro. I do wish the pre-compiled package repository could be larger, though it's grown quite a lot over the last 6 months. I'm downloading the source for blender at the minute, hopefully it won't be _too_ much trouble to get that working.

Does anybody else get annoyed that while installing most versions of linux (that I've tried anyway, and solaris apparently!) you can't set the uid from the main installer? Even though as soon as it's up and running using any of the "add user" gui tools allows you to set the uid? I almost always wind up making a temporary user for the install, then adding my real user later on.
I have a few computers at home, and like to keep my uid common across them.

Anyways, I'm quite keen to have another tinker with OpenSolaris, see how zfs goes for snapshots and the like (though I can't really use zfs to it's full potential in a single disk laptop). Hopefully I can blender compiled and have a play with that as well, I'm curious if it runs any faster under OpenSolaris than linux.

No comments: