Wibblelog

I’ve finally gotten around to messing with OpenSolaris a bit at home, and I’m simultaneously impressed and disappointed. I’ve been excited about stuff like ZFS for a long time now, and I’m anxious to run my home fileserver with that, but as with all projects in computing it’s more annoying than I want it to be to get things working.

My problem with Solaris and OpenSolaris at the moment is that it seems like the features I want are perpetually right around the corner, so I should wait just a little longer and then everything will be happy and perfect. First it was ZFS existing, then ZFS in a stable release, then ZFS root, then BrandZ (the magic stuff that lets you basically run a Linux distribution inside a Solaris zone), and now the Solaris CIFS server which is supposed to be super awesome and integrated, but doesn’t quite exist yet. The code is there, but it’s not in the most recent release of SCDE or SXCE or Nevada or Indiana or Solaris or whatever the hell it is I’m supposed to be using… Which leads me into another bit of complaint: Which freaking version of Solaris do I even want?! I was less intimidated by this stuff when there was just Solaris, and it was a big mean monolith of UNIX that required you to wear suspenders and grow a beard for ten years to use it properly. The stuff that’s coming out now is incredibly cool, but also wicked fragmented. I understand that project Indiana is intended to unify the Solaris universe significantly and bring it closer to the computing nirvana everybody wishes for, but as always, that awesome thing is juuuust around the corner and not here yet. I’m continuing to be patient, and now starting to try using these things and perhaps contribute to the community, but I have to wonder if six months from now I’ll still be holding out for the next must-have feature that will be just around the corner in another few months. The answer is probably yes, of course, given the nature of the computing universe. What I really hope for, however, is something that’s good enough to settle down with for a while and really use. I’m OK with patches, bug fixes and workarounds, as long as there’s something I’ll be able to install on my machine at home and know that I’ll be able to use for at least a year or so without absolutely needing to reinstall it to keep up with the OpenSolaris community. When can I have that?

There is a good side to this, though it’s shrouded in more complaining. I installed Indiana on my little desktop machine at home, and it damn near works. Aside from some glaringly obnoxious omissions (no compiler? no java? WTF!), I’m running into all sorts of trivial little things. For instance, I have a SUN KEYBOARD attached to my machine, and some of the keys don’t even work. I could really care less about the Stop/Again/Props/Undo/Front/Copy/etc buttons, but having the volume and power keys work would be mighty nice. Also, when I logged into the default desktop, which is a GNOME setup that looks exactly like Ubuntu (not a complaint, mind you), I found that the default terminal was anti-aliased, which I hate, and Firefox font rendering was NOT anti-aliased. WTF, kinda. I grabbed my .Xresources file from elsewhere and fired up a plain old xterm (which was not in the default system PATH, of course) and was happy enough. So what’s my point? The fact that I’m even bothering to voice these petty complaints about a Solaris system is fairly amazing. Think of all the things I’m not complaining about: X came up like magic, with the right screen resolution for my 24″ LCD panel. Audio works. Really - it just works. WIFI works, to my great amazement. I booted up, it asked me what wifi network to connect to, I provided it with my WEP key (which I have memorized, thankfully), and it just freaking worked. I’m still a bit stunned at that one. I mean, Ubuntu works that smoothly these days, but it’s still a pain in the ass to get Windows to work with the average wifi card if the driver for it isn’t included with Windows. Holycrap, Solaris beats windows at network configuration. Never thought I’d see the day.

Update: No sooner did I post this than I read someone else’s very similar rant right on blogs.sun.com: Read what Bill Sommerfeld has to say about the matter. Tim Foster also has something to say about brand fragmentation.