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Sun has made good on its promise to deliver OpenSolaris, the company's Unix-based answer to Linux, with the most recent update arriving in mid-May. Although far from a complete product, the latest OpenSolaris is impressive and in the long run could prove a viable alternative to Linux.
Part of OpenSolaris' appeal is that it contains a subset of the source code for the Solaris Operating System, but with an open source license. Among the familiar Sun features are the enviable DTrace tuning and monitoring tool and the ever-impressive ZFS filesystem, neither of which are likely to make it to Linux due to licensing conflicts.
On the other hand, larger Linux efforts like Debian (which is the basis of Ubuntu) have an impressive range of open source software packages which, so far, OpenSolaris can't match.
However, given that OpenSolaris can potentially expand its package support far more easily than Linux can start shipping a DTrace equivalent, OpenSolaris may prove a powerful competitor in the years to come.
As it stands we wouldn't recommend OpenSolaris to the casual user; there's enough gotchas and quirks to make running OpenSolaris a bit more of a headache than Linux (of course that largely depends on your hardware).
Still, given that much of OpenSolaris' potential audience are developers interested in its underlying tools like Dtrace or "containers," we wouldn't hesitate to recommend it for advanced users. Just beware that the hardware driver support is nowhere near that of Linux rivals.
Back when OpenSolaris was first released, <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/16/solaris_x86_not_too_shabby/">we found its device driver support lacking</a> and unfortunately not much has changed on that front. OpenSolaris had trouble with our Thinkpad T61 Wifi drivers and did no better with an older Toshiba laptop. The only successful connection we managed to get was from OpenSolaris running in VMWare on a MacBook.
Some things have improved since the initial release though -- most notably the installer. Installing OpenSolaris is as easy as mainstream Linux distros -- just pop in a live CD and select the install option. OpenSolaris will then walk you through the setup and reboot once your system is installed.
The Live CD desktop includes a launcher for the Device Driver Utility, which makes it much easier to see which of your devices have drivers attached and which do not. If there isn't anything red in the Device Driver Utility list, then all your hardware should be supported just fine. If you get warnings, it's probably better to look and see if drivers exist before you go ahead with the installation.
If you're looking to setup a dual boot system it's not too difficult. As long as you're using GRUB as your bootloader you should be okay. But have a look through the <a href="http://dlc.sun.com/osol/docs/content/IPS/prepmulti.html">OpenSolaris docs</a>, there's a couple of gotchas -- like making sure the Solaris partition precedes the Linux swap partition.
Once OpenSolaris is installed, you'll be prompted to reboot. Grab of cup of something strong because it's the longest boot time you're likely to encounter (unless you have a copy of Mac OS 9 lying around).
By default OpenSolaris boots into the GNOME desktop environment, which is similar to what you'll find in Ubuntu and other Debian Linux distros, though with OpenSolaris you'll be using GNOME 2.20, missing out of some of the latest and greatest GNOME features (Ubuntu, Fedora and others currently ship with GNOME 2.22).
Despite being a version behind the curve, if you're comfortable with Ubuntu, OpenSolaris will look familiar. All the GNOME panels, file manager, and customization options work just as you would expect. The most noticeable difference is that Sun has included a very slick theme by the name of Nimbus, which uses gradients and drop shadows to create a very attractive look, along the lines of Fedora 9 and miles ahead of Ubuntu's somewhat ugly brown theme.
Most of the typical GNOME apps are present -- Firefox is the default web browser, Thunderbird and Evolution are both included along with all the games and most of the smaller GNOME apps as well.
Given that OpenSolaris is largely aimed at developers we were surprised to find that GNOME isn't the only thing lagging a few revisions behind -- OpenSolaris ships with Python 2.4.4, rather than the newer 2.5 and getting Ruby on Rails up and running is an entirely DIY experience.
The good news is that OpenSolaris has a new image packaging system, which works much like apt-get on Linux. Getting the latest version of your favorite tools is as easy as you're used to on Linux. Well, other than the fact that Sun's default repository often doesn't offer the latest versions.
The downside if you're coming from a Linux background is that OpenSolaris has very different locations for its various config tools. In short, it looks like GNOME, but it's definitely not Linux and you'll need to adjust, which isn't a criticism, just a heads up.
In the end we were able to set up Ruby on Rails and Django development environments, as well as a the traditional LAMP environment, without any significant trouble (once we got a network connection up and running through VMWare).
OpenSolaris 2008.05 packs in most of what Linux users are likely to expect -- GNOME, easy installation, good software update tools and more -- and then adds some extras on top. Although OpenSolaris isn't quite ready for prime time, when it is, it'll be a nice possible alternative to Linux.
Because it ships with a number of developer-focused tools that most desktop users probably don't care about -- the ZFS filesystem, DTrace, and "containers" -- it may not be all that compelling for average users.
However, for those building web apps or handling network tasks like scaling web apps (can someone please send OpenSolaris to the Twitter scaling team) OpenSolaris offers a complete debugging toolkit that won't be found in most Linux distros.
While those currently running their development stack on Red Hat or perhaps Ubuntu Linux are definitely part of OpenSolaris' target audience, Sun is also chasing the latest trends, like hosted "cloud computing" platforms such as Amazon's EC2.
Amazon recently started offering the ability to run OpenSolaris applications on its EC2 servers. For the time being, Amazon's OpenSolaris support is limited to invitation-only clients, but Amazon plans to go public once the kinks are worked out.
It's hard to say that OpenSolaris is any better or worse than your favorite Linux distro. In fact, once the issues get ironed out, we imagine OpenSolaris will have the same sort of relationship to popular Linux distributions as they share among themselves. In other words, Ubuntu is an option, Fedora is an option, OpenSUSE is an option and eventually, OpenSolaris will be another option.
As for which one is "the best" -- that all depend on what you want to do.
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