Sean's Technological Journeys

Since I am an operating system connoisseur, and especially because I can hardly pass up Free Software operating systems, I downloaded OpenSolaris 2008.11 today, out of curiosity. I started out with somewhat low expectations, so when my favorite Linux and cross-platform software started popping up left and right, I was very surprised. It would seem that even some of the big, non-Sun vendors – Nvidia and Adobe – are backing OpenSolaris by supporting the platform.

Here is a summary of what I have experienced:
1. Virtually all of the most popular FOSS desktop applications are available. They may not come on the installation disk, but you can install them with a click in the package manager – after a sizable download, of course.

2. Due to the availability of the vast majority of important FOSS software, your OpenSolaris desktop will quickly start to look and feel like a Solaris-stylized Linux distro. Those already used to a GNOME-based Linux desktop will not see a dramatic difference in the end-user applications.

3. The breadth of hardware support, particularly for laptops, is not on par with Linux. However, if you get lucky and OpenSolaris supports your hardware, getting the basics will be very easy for you.

4. You can find precompiled binaries of all sorts of things floating around the net. With a bit of creative googling, you can go well beyond the offerings of the package manager, and have Firefox with Adobe Flash 10, Adobe Reader, Java 6, and even Gstreamer-based movie playing with Totem.

5. There is plenty of Linux-specific software that has yet to be ported to OpenSolaris. Sometimes it may be just a few lines of code where a library call needs to be tweaked; other times a significant rewrite is needed. However, the number of Linux-specific packages that recently support OpenSolaris is rapidly increasing.

6. One major advantage of OpenSolaris is the genius that is the ZFS filesystem. Even on relatively modest disk hardware, ZFS has noticeable performance gains over the popular Linux alternatives, ext3 and reiserfs. This is directly observable to an end-user when doing things like file copies or installing software. You can read more about the performance of ZFS with Michael Larabel’s independent review of operating system performance, between FreeBSD, Linux and OpenSolaris, here.

7. There’s no way that anyone not already an experienced Linux or Solaris user will find this operating system workable, especially compared to Mac or Win32. You need to be conversant in F/OSS technology, and fight a sometimes uphill battle, to get OpenSolaris to the point where it has feature parity with a common Linux distro such as Ubuntu. Most of the problems, oversights, and incompatibilities of OpenSolaris are not with the front-end applications, but under the hood; these compatibilities, while more concealed from the user, are not less significant due to their nature. In fact, certain problems like filesystem support may be a primary deterrent to end-user adoption until more of these features are brought into the out-of-box experience.

Now, here are some of the gory details of my experiences so far:

• NTFS support: Very Difficult. Involves tweaks to PATH, downloading of SUNWonbld, install of Sun Studio 12 Express (with the package manager), more tweaks to PATH, compiling FUSE (kernel and library) from source, compiling pkg-config from source, then figuring out which disk devices correspond to the NTFS volumes you want to mount. Final Status: Takes a fair bit of patience and expertise, but works. Read support appears very stable; I’m afraid to try write support due to the early status of FUSE on OpenSolaris. I have seen reports of the write support causing lockups, but this may have been fixed recently. Under active development. Helpful link (with a chance for free tech support from a Sun employee!): OpenSolaris FUSE forums.
• Marvell Yukon PCI-Express GB Ethernet Driver: Doable, but inconvenient. A benefactor in the community, Masayuki Murayama, has released and actively updates device drivers for several ethernet chipsets that Solaris does not support out of the box. When these will be integrated into the out of the box experience remains unknown. Fortunately, the install process for these, once the files were transferred to the OpenSolaris machine using a FAT32 external hard drive, was very, very easy. Note that if your ethernet hardware is supported out of the box, then you are better off than I was.
• Skype: Likely unavailable for now. There is no native build of Skype for any Solaris; your alternatives are to tar up a Linux distro install and run it in a BrandZ container; or, attempt to run the Windows version of Skype using Wine. Since the latter is much simpler, I chose to download the Solaris builds of wine that are linked to from WineHQ: Wine for Solaris is here. The app starts, and the GUI appears correct. Chat works. But, as expected, sound doesn’t work. Also, after about 5 minutes of running idle, the app crashes. I think the built-in Sun audio system is the problem; it is likely unsupported under Wine. I should probably try to build the CDDL’ed version of OSS v4.1 RC for OpenSolaris and see if that works any better.
• Flash 10: Easy to install, easy to find, works flawlessly. Newbies might puzzle for a moment on where they need to place the plugin, but Adobe Labs has made available a Flash 10 beta for Solaris. Works great with Firefox 3.0.4, shipped with OSOL 2008.11. Compared to the above issues, this is cake. Youtube within 10 minutes of post-install is a nice feature.
• Adobe Reader 8: Available through emulation of the Adobe 8 for SPARC package. Earlier this year, Codeweavers ported Google Chrome to Linux using Wine, with a bundled custom version of Wine that runs it fairly well. Transitive, a cross-platform virtualization company, has now jumped on the Look What I Can Do bandwagon and now gives us an alternative to the preinstalled GNOME Evince PDF reader. This proprietary alternative may be capable of reading certain complex PDFs that are not rendered properly with Evince, though I have yet to find a PDF that doesn’t look great with Evince. Still, this is an interesting use of developer energy directed towards OpenSolaris x86 users.
• Wine: See above info for Skype. Installs and runs, but I have yet to get sound working on a Wine app; furthermore, installing the package maintainer’s strange .lzma archive requires compiling the open source LZMA extractor, just to get at the raw .pkg file beneath it.
• EXT2/EXT3 filesystem support: Available through ext2fuse, a package similar to ntfs-3g. The trials and tribulations of getting a working FUSE kernel/lib install far outweigh the difficulty of compiling this small package. If you have any ext2 volumes, this should suffice once you get it working.
• Linux Old Hand Learning Curve: Moderate to high. Much is familiar, and much is unfamiliar, if you’re coming to OpenSolaris with experience hacking on Linux. Informational tools are often named differently; even tools of the same program name have different options and behavior. The Sun CLI userland feels antiquated and very rudimentary compared to the well-documented and flexible GNU userland. Certain things behave as expected, such as directory navigation; some things have reasonably simple analogues that you can adapt to, such as disk device enumeration in /dev/dsk; some things are wildly different, such as the Sun package manager(s).
• 3d Graphics: Nvidia’s binary drivers are really the only semblance of modern OpenGL support. The Nvidia drivers have feature parity with the Linux equivalent, supporting OpenGL 2.1.2 and GLSL. Some work has been done to get the Mesa stack working in Solaris world, but so far I would say that you need to have an Nvidia graphics card, and you need to be willing to use the binary-only drivers; otherwise, prospects of 3d acceleration on OpenSolaris are very poor indeed.
• Multimedia: The situation is bad. Out of the box support for free formats is provided, via the gstreamer packages. However, any of the patent-encumbered formats, such as mp3 and aac, are not shipped. You can attempt to download these non-free codecs from Blastwave, but they are so old that they either do not work with your current gstreamer core, or they work but they’re intolerably slow. Seriously – some of that blastwave stuff is from 2003. It doesn’t seem to fit very well with some of the more recently-updated packages. Your only alternative is to re-build the entire multimedia stack from source, including external decoder libraries (of which there are about a dozen), and then rebuild gstreamer from scratch. This can be done with some minor workarounds and thorough knowledge of the software in question, but that’s well beyond a newbie’s capability. A newbie’s only hope might be to run a simple, well-integrated media player app under wine, after they get sound to work under wine. Either that, or only use free formats like theora and vorbis.
• Office: On par with Linux. OpenOffice runs flawlessly (of course) on the Solaris platform. You could even say that it’s fast - spiffy - a little bit more spit and polish than most Linux builds of OpenOffice.

In conclusion, OpenSolaris has many problems out of the box for the end-user, that can be fairly easily solved with some more attention by the distro maintainers. In general, free software packages out in the wild are either programmed with OpenSolaris quirks in mind; or, OpenSolaris’ userland is running out of quirks, so more and more Linux-targeted code can run unmodified. Either way, you can almost always grab a GNU tarball of the latest stable off of a GNU FTP mirror, and have few problems building it, except to meet dependency version requirements.

Should end-users jump on the OpenSolaris bandwagon today? No.

Should F/OSS supporters, enthusiasts and evangelists jump on the OpenSolaris bandwagon today? I think so. Try it. Realize that there’s a free alternative to Linux. If the corporate types manage to corrupt the spirit of Linux someday, we’ll need a backup to continue the F/OSS movement.

Should system hackers, curious UNIX heads, and sysadmins looking for a performance boost jump on the OpenSolaris bandwagon today? Absolutely. Not only will the OS be easy to use (or even fun to learn!) for this sort of person, but its features will be of great importance.

Good luck,

Sean

UPDATE: I tried to compile the latest OSS4/CDDL drivers, a 4.1 release candidate, for OpenSolaris. The compile succeeded, but loading the modules (oss_haudio in particular) causes a kernel panic. This is not entirely unexpected, however, because I get the same behavior when loading oss_hdaudio on a Linux kernel. I think in this case that OpenSolaris is not to blame, but rather, my Intel ICH10 based integrated sound card, which is quite new. I’m using the new Intel X58 motherboard chipset.

I might invest some spare time in trying the OSS4/CDDL release candidate again when it’s updated, but for now I am back to using GNU/Linux (Fedora 10, to be precise) with ALSA underneath. It supports my HD Audio very well.