OpenSolaris 2008.05 Gives A New Face To Solaris

[TOM]

In early February, Sun Microsystems had released a second preview release of Project Indiana. For those out of the loop, Project Indiana is the codename for the project led by Ian Murdock at Sun that aims to push OpenSolaris on more desktop and notebook computers by addressing the long-standing usability problems of Solaris. We were far from being impressed by Preview 2 as it hadn't possessed any serious advantages over a GNU/Linux desktop that would interest normal users. However, with the release of OpenSolaris 2008.05 "Project Indiana" coming up in May, Sun Microsystems has today released a final test copy of this operating system. Our initial experience with this new OpenSolaris release is vastly better than what we had encountered less than three months ago when last looking at Project Indiana.





In the Tour of Project Indiana Preview 2, we had summarized our findings at the time with:

"So what do we think of OpenSolaris Developer Preview 1/08? Well, it looks like a basic GNOME desktop found in many Linux distributions, but Sun engineers (and the OpenSolaris community) have done a great job at making Solaris a more viable operating system for the desktop but frankly they still have a ways to go in accomplishing their goals and until then we cannot see its mainstream adoption. Project Indiana still lacks a charisma or really anything to make it very exciting to a simple desktop user. Sure, D-Trace, ZFS, and the other Solaris technologies are great for a technologist, but a normal desktop user just won't care -- Project Indiana has yet to even include a word processor. We are looking forward to the OpenSolaris release in March, but we don't expect any major changes until the OpenSolaris "Jericho" release that is coming six months later."

With the test version of OpenSolaris 2008.05, this statement is now partially outdated and in this article we will go over some of the new highlights. If you want to look back, there is also Project Indiana Preview 1.





Once the OpenSolaris LiveCD had booted, we were immediately greeted by a new theme that was vastly different from before. The background is nice and the colors have been improved. OpenSolaris 2008.05 is shipping with GNOME 2.20.2 but not the newer GNOME 2.22 release (Eight Interesting Improvements In GNOME 2.22). However, OpenSolaris 2008.11 "Jericho" should ship with GNOME 2.22 or ideally GNOME 2.24.




The Device Driver Utility in OpenSolaris shows all of the system components along with driver information and hardware information such as the vendor and device IDs.





In the last Project Indiana article, we criticized it for the lack of a graphical front-end for the IPS packaging system. Fortunately though in this release is a GUI Package Manager for the Image Packaging System. This manager is laid out in a similar fashion to apt's Synaptic Package Manager. Packages can be sorted by category, search, ordered in various ways, and can be sorted by different repositories. This OpenSolaris Package Manager (it's just called packagemanager) has been developed by Sun and is currently at version 0.1. This graphical-based package manager worked out quite well in our initial tests and we are very pleased with its addition in time for the 2008.05 release.





The test copy of OpenSolaris 2008.05 is shipping with GIMP 2.4.1, Mozilla Firefox 2, and Pidgin 2.1. It's a bit unfortunate that Pidgin 2.1 is being used instead of the more recent Pidgin 2.4 release, which introduces a number of new features.





OpenSolaris 2008.05 is another Solaris OS shipping with the NVIDIA binary driver. For those using ATI/AMD Radeon or FireGL hardware, this Solaris OS ships with the xf86-video-radeon driver as well as the new RadeonHD driver in Solaris, but the latter currently lacks 3D support. The xf86-video-intel driver is used for Intel IGPs.





This test release is based upon Solaris Express Community Edition (a.k.a. "Solaris Nevada") Build 86. OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 was based upon Nevada Build 75.






The OpenSolaris 2008.05 Installer uses Project Caiman for installation with its attractive but easy to use user-interface. We have long criticized Sun for its drop-down menus when selecting the location/time-zone during Solaris installations, but this has been cleared up in this version of the Caiman Installer by finally adding in a world map.





Driver/hardware permitting, OpenSolaris 2008.05 supports Compiz and even ships with the advanced Compiz Settings Manager.





One item not better handled yet is selecting the keyboard layout when in a non-X environment.





Another problem is that OpenSolaris 2008.05 continues to ship without any office applications (aside from the Evince Document Viewer) on the LiveCD. Hopefully they will be able to find the room to include StarOffice or OpenOffice in the next OpenSolaris release or at the very least would be including AbiWord.


Sun Microsystems still has some work to do in improving the OpenSolaris experience, but they are now making some excellent headway. The theme for OpenSolaris 2008.05 is great by our tastes and goes to providing a feel for a richer experience. The biggest feature we feel that has been added to OpenSolaris is the graphical package manager for IPS. Sun Microsystems is clearly trying to use OpenSolaris to increase their desktop OS market share and expecting some users to use the command-line to install packages is not an option. Sun Package Manager 0.1 isn't fully polished but it looks and works similar to the Synaptic Package Manager and makes it simple to add/remove new packages over the network. Compiz by default is another item that can now be scratched off our gripes list. This test release of OpenSolaris 2008.05 has also offered the best hardware support from our testing and corrects some issues we previously encountered with Solaris/OpenSolaris. Overall, OpenSolaris 2008.05 provides a new user experience and gives a new face to Solaris.





While Sun Microsystems should celebrate over these recent OpenSolaris advancements, there still are items to be addressed and improved for future releases, such as including a word processor by default. OpenSolaris 2008.05 is reaching a better parity with Linux, but it still lacks advantages that would make an average desktop user switch from Windows or Linux over to Sun's operating system. With these recent OpenSolaris improvements, it even makes us even more excited to see what innovations will be delivered with OpenSolaris Jericho towards the end of the year.

We anticipate OpenSolaris 2008.05 will be released in early May. This test release of OpenSolaris 2008.05 follows the release of Solaris 10 5/08 earlier this week. Tell us what you think about this Project Indiana release in the Phoronix Forums.


Written by Michael Larabel
From : phoronix.com