I installed OpenSolaris on an Athlon 64 X2 with 3 GB of RAM and it took an 40 minutes to install CD. After it booted up, I had Gnome 2.26 of course. It feels a lot like Linux, yet is smoother when I move around windows. I believe this has something to do with the 850 MB the kernel uses while OpenSuse 11.2 Gnome uses like 490 MB with nothing open. OpenSolaris 2009.06 is the only OS I can find on Ebay. The new release comes out in June. Solaris 2009 06 recognized my Dlink 108 Mbit Wifi connection and my NTFS slave drives, my Windows 7 partition and thumb drive. I asked the forum if developers could make a KDE and Gnome combo DVD like OpenSuse would.
There is no OpenOffice 3.1 so I was looking for a Wine emulator on Rapidshare, Megaupload, and others. That's what Linux has advantage with presently.
ZFS is a lot better file system than EXT4 and even BTRFS. ZFS is even more advanced than Microsoft's NTFS or Disturbed File System . It has more features than NTFS for Windows 7 on it.
My rating of OpenSolaris 2009 06 is an 7.5 out of 10. I knew I should take off 20 points for no office suite and no Wine. Stability is perfect however. It also doesn't come with any problems at all, just the bare bones! -5 points right there. It would make an awesome server with the stability. I don't think infiltrated Ubuntu's base, because Open Solaris came out in mid-2008 and wasn't great until 2009.06 release due to the improvements to ZFS features and ZFS tools integration into the Gnome GUI.
The GNU is complaining that it's inferior is compatible with OpenSolaris, but the OpenSolaris code isn't backwards compatible with their license. Having the ZFS file system in Linux is all the rage, but they can't due to GPL 3.0 incompatibility. That and Linux is still less stable even though you can't tell with Ubuntu and Fedora! UNIX is up 365 days. Linux is up 362 days a year. OpenSolaris could seriously overtake Linux in the future, because OpenSolaris has the best of both worlds. Linux only has one world and thus inferior. This answers the question that Linux passed UNIX solely do to the GNU and free was behind it. Even a professor would tell you that Linux was implemented as early as 1999 to cut costs and wiped UNIX off the map until Opensolaris was publically available.
Bad thing about OpenSolaris is you must have two boot loaders. You must always parition first, install Windows first, OpenSoarlis second and OpenSuse third; otherwise the GRUB menu only shows OpenSolaris and Windows and no OpenSuse. Even then I had to load into OpenSuse and select SDA3 on my yast boot loader and name SDA3 "OpenSolaris". I have to do this every time now. Fortunely, it doesn't create bad karma of OpenSolaris 2009 06 with me.
Solaris ZFS offers a dramatic advance in data management with an innovative approach to data integrity, tremendous performance improvements, and a welcome integration of file system and volume management capabilities. The centerpiece of this new architecture is the concept of the virtual storage pool which de-couples the file system from physical storage in the same way that virtual memory abstracts the address space from physical memory; allowing for much more efficient use of the storage devices. In ZFS, space is shared dynamically between multiple file systems from a single storage pool, and is parceled out from the pool as file systems request it. So, physical storage can be added to or removed from storage pools dynamically, without interrupting services. This provides new levels of flexibility, availability, and performance. And in terms of scalability, Solaris ZFS is a 128-bit file system. Its theoretical limits are truly mind-boggling—2128 bytes of storage and 264 for everything else, such as file systems, snapshots, directory entries, and devices.
7.5 out of 10. (8.0 if I could find WINE)
