Toshiba in cooperation with Sun Micrososystems offers notebooks with OpenSolaris pre-installed. Based on my little experience with OpenSolaris I got the impression that it’s one of the best operating systems available today, especially with developers using open source technologies like Java, MySQL, PHP, Ruby, RoR, Tomcat, Glassfish and many of the common open source web stack technologies. But the OS would probably be seen as a great OS for enterprise server deployments, not something you’d run on your notebook. But that will change.
Toshiba's Tecra M10 and Portégé R60 with OpenSolaris pre-installed
The cooperation with Toshiba is a first approach to bring OpenSolaris into the notebook market for a larger number of people, definitely targeting developers using many of the well-established open source products by Sun. What does the OpenSolaris package include on the notebooks?
The Tecra M10 and Portégé R600 come preinstalled with OpenSolaris 2008.11 release and several supplemental software packages, such as the following:
- – Adobe Flash Player
- – Glassfish V2
- – Java SE Development Kit 6 Update 10
- – NetBeans IDE 6.5
- – OpenOffice 3.0
- – Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0.6
- – Sun Studio Express 11/08
- – Web Stack that includes MySQL and the Apache Web Server
Timeslider with ZFS in OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris has some nice features like the Timeslider with ZFS. In this screen cast Roman Strobl shows the new functionality available starting with OpenSolaris 2008.11 . Time Slider allows users get instant rollback and point in time snapshots. This is possible the thought the ZFS Snapshots and now can be easily used by users thought the Time Slider in the Gnome interface.
While Timeslider is just one of the interesting features of OpenSolaris, the full software package Sun offers make it the perfect OS for development, including the powerful and much improved NetBeans IDE (with support for PHP, RoR, JRuby, Groovy/Grails and the whole JEE stack. Another powerful feature is DTrace:
DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for the Solari Operating Environment. DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs.
My experience with OpenSolaris
When I first tested OpenSolaris within VirtualBox on my Macbook Pro I was surprised to see that many of the Flash bugs I’ve seen in Linux didn’t exist for the OpenSolaris version of the Flash Player. I’ve been doing a lot of testing with OpenLaszlo Flash-based applications in the last months, and always ran into the Flash unicode problem (special chars in languages like French, German, Russian, Chinese, etc. get messed up – FP-40 bug). I was very surprised to see that Flash Player worked so much better on OpenSolaris compared to all Linux distributions, and the performance was excellent as well.
In 2004 I wanted to switch to FreeBSD as an OS for development, but as I constantly needed to test Flash applications I couldn’t use that system. Linux is a nice OS, but I prefer BSD systems, they just seem to be cleaner and better organized in the way they store configurations. OpenSolaris would be my preferred development system, although I still need software running on OS X, like Photoshop, OmniGraffle, Mindjet Manager and even Microsoft Office, in case a customer has an office document with a lot of VB scripting/macros.
Future of OpenSolaris
An interesting market for OpenSolaris would be the netbook or even mobile OS market. Apple and Google have shown what it means to have a full OS optimized for mobile devices, and OpenSolaris is rock-solid operating system that could be used as a mobile OS as well. Let’s see what Oracle will do with OpenSolaris, once the merger with Sun went through. I consider OpenSolaris the most interesting open source OS for the enterprise world, and technically it’s far ahead of what distributions like Ubuntu can offer you right now.
