OpenSolaris 2008.11

This is my first post from OpenSolaris 2008.11.

First impressions: I like it.  A smoother, easier experience than 2008.05, and more up-to-date goodies than SXCE.  But I expect I may have a gremlin or two yet to come: time will tell.

I have SXCE still on the other half of my hard disc in the Sun box.  Using old-fashioned partitions is probably a mistake, but it gives me clean dual-boot – or will do, once I’ve figured out the Grub magic.  Grub documentation tends to be Linux-oriented, so I have to figure out the Solaris equivalents for device and kernel names.  Even on Linux (and multi-boot systems) I’ve always used LILO in the past.

That installer is for the most part very smooth and easy: the only questions I had to answer concerned my language, keyboard layout, and timezone, and setting up an account and passwords.  But in one glaring respect it’s still a royal pain: there’s no decent fdisk facility, and it’ll wipe any existing Solaris partitions you have (that’s actually why I’ve put off installing it so long).  Oh, and it doesn’t offer any control over installing the bootloader (Grub).  Before installing 2008.11, I had to mark the SXCE partition as Linux in the partition table (that makes no difference to the data on the partition, but just tells the OpenSolaris installer to leave it alone).  Actually I guess anything non-Solaris would’ve sufficed, and maybe the installer would’ve set up dual-boot for me if I’d marked it as NTFS ….

Anyway, if all goes well I’ll look forward to migrating my day-to-day work to this platform.