Impressed with OpenSolaris

[technossomy]

Have just installed the latest OpenSolaris version (2008.11) on a spare machine and I was quite impressed with its capabilities. This is a live CD with a basic feature set on top of GNOME, but has all the horsepower of a UNIX machine. It utilises 64 bits out of the box, installs in about 3 minutes (think Knoppix) and connects to the network immediately. My two major concerns are that it will not boot from USB and that it came from the company that gave us Java.

[bigtomrodney]

I'm looking forward to trying it. It'll be nice to try anothe *nix. I've tried both Solaris and openSolaris in the past but both have dissapointed. However with that said there is a lot of buzz and a large amount of praise for this latest release.

You say it installs in 3 minutes - is that a full HDD install?

[aluminumspleen]

why are you concerned because it came from the same company that gave us Java?

I also am impressed, and look forward to installing the latest release on my new box.

[technossomy]

There is an option for a HDD install, which takes at least an hour and a half or so (wasn't attending the process). So the time I was referring to was the time from start up to having a connected system available.

Regarding the Java remark, it reads a bit degrading and is not against Sun. In our company we do not use Java for performance reasons. The remark was against the background that future releases could have a heavier reliance on Java, which then renders the OS not part of any upgrade path. Hope this helps.