Savannah W-ITS

I get vendor emails on a daily basis – I usually ignore the web links that they contain…

Today, I accepted the invitation to visit Sun’s Web site.  While there, I happened upon an Open Solaris VDI download (~2GB compressed image.)  After downloading just uncompress, import into your VDI disk image selections, create a new Open Solaris type virtual machine (VM) and assign the image to the machine.  [[ I will re-visit Open Solaris when I can give this new OS more time - this post is simply about using the VDI... ]] Some notes:

• the uncompressed image is ~8GB (and will expand/grow to a maximum of ~32 GB – so make sure you have enough disk space!)
• when created a new Open Solaris VM the default RAM is 512MB – it’s not enough (on my system – swapping started almost immediately)
• I increased the RAM to 1GB and the default system is using ~800MB so my guess is you would need 1.5-2 GB to really use this as EM-VM**
• welcome home Jack? (the default user)
• the Gnome GUI is, of course, very nice (already running it on FC9 so I have GG in GG = GG^4?)
• the first ’system update’ installed a new version of the software updater – I am now waiting for the ~1.2GB set of software updates to be downloaded and installed)
• the package manager is checking ~19000+ entries…
• after an update, Package Manager indicates that I have 1465 packages listed and 852 installed
• the default workspace contains two icons (Package Manager and Register)
• the CPU is pretty much pegged when running the Package Manager (note that we have an OS GUI instance running a second OS GUI – I would not expect great performance…)
• note that even without using the Package Manager or the Register link that this VDI is configured to ‘phone home’ every time you crank it up (you can disable this ‘feature’…)  Also note that Fedora, Windows and probably quite a number of other OSs do similar things.

Whoops! seems my connections was lost so Package Manager is restarted.

• 794 packages will be updated and 85 packages will be installed; 1.17 GB will be downloaded
• before I started this VM I was already running an XP VM; the system was operating with less than 10% utilization
• now (while running FC9, 1 VirtualBox XP instance, and 1 VirtualBox Open Solaris instance) the system is operating at ~50% utilization
• The Open Solaris VM is showing 100% CPU utilization, 98% of RAM utilization, ~700MB of swap (looks like the Open Solaris VM won’t be happy with less than ~2GB of RAM…)

What’s missing?

• no sudo????? (I saw it on the update list…)
• no Welcome docs?  start here? how to customize? (i.e.  no ROOT pw?)
• OK – start Firefox and you get a ‘Welcome Message‘ as well as the news that you are running under RBAC (role based access control – the superuser account is now a ‘role’.)
• you would think that a download would NOT require so many updates?  What, no automatic up-to-date-build-process??? (i.e. any VDI file is current as of the download date – Sun could save quite a bit of bandwidth for everyone….)
• man pages???

missing – Missing Manual Page

DESCRIPTION
Unfortunately, this OpenSolaris Developer Preview  does  not
include  the  manual  page you are looking for.  We’re sorry
and hope to improve upon this situation in future releases.

Online versions  of  many  manual  pages  are  available  at

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/40.17.

Hmm – now what did Vista get pounded for???? Oh, yes – changing many, many standard/expected/loved/hated OS features that folks spent years learning under previous versions of Windows – changing them disrupts the user’s workflow and that makes users unhappy which means….  But wait!

It is possible to install ’sudo’… Ok. My expectation from any Unix type OS is to find much that is similar/basic with much that is vendor specific and highly functional.  Since Open Solaris is an Open Source Os  (OSOSO?) there is of course community input so this might be a really wild mix of things.

I am going to speculate at this point – running VirtualBox VMs with Open Solaris as a host OS will probably be similar to running VirtualBox under Vista (Base OS using ~1/4-1/3 of system RAM/CPU, but, VMs will behave well with hardware – unlike running VirtualBox on FC9  – which has some hardware issues that really reflect the state of USB support under Fedora…)

** EM-VM = emulation mode virtual machine; the VirtualBox Virtual Machine solution is an emulation solution; your OS of choice is both your OS and hypervisor (VM manager) and, any VM will most likely not perform as well as when it is run under a fully virtualized solution such as the bare-metal-OS versions of Xen or VMware.

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