Desktop
OpenSolaris uses Gnome as the default desktop, as was the case with Solaris 10. It's nice to see that CDE has been done away with completely - and all the better for it.
The default colour scheme is pleasant enough; far better than that provided by Ubuntu, but otherwise nothing out of the ordinary. The usual smattering of standard Gnome utilities and marginally entertaining games is provided, although they are slightly older than those that came with recent releases of Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuSE.
Firefox 2 is the default (and only) web browser supplied; with a release so close to the launch of Firefox 3, it's a shame they couldn't have provided beta versions of the newer product, as was done with Ubuntu, because Firefox 2 will become obsolete very rapidly now.
For email, there's a choice of either Thunderbird or the perpetually frustrating Evolution (which managed to hang when I first attempted to use it). Nothing particularly exciting here, both applications work as one would expect them to.
Oddly enough, OpenOffice isn't provided on the installer CD; presumably this is due to space considerations, but it would have made a nice showcase for Sun if it had been included. Nevertheless, packages are provided via the installer system, so it's just a matter of waiting for it to download.
There was one really niggling annoyance that I had. For some reason, I couldn't get the DHCP client working (which is most likely my fault, and that's not what I'm complaining about), and every time I logged into the box, a message popped up on the screen telling me about this, and I had to respond to it before I could proceed any further. Now, as far as I'm concerned, this is sort of behaviour should have been abandoned along with Windows 3.1. Sure, notify me, preferably in a small popup box down in the bottom right-hand corner that I can ignore, but please, don't force me to acknowledge it every time I log in!
Command Line
It's great to see that many GNU utilities are now standard in OpenSolaris and that the default PATH includes them before any of the legacy Sun utilities. Most of these are vastly more powerful than their legacy Solaris counterparts (just compare GNU tar with Solaris tar, for example).
Unfortunately, it's only a limited set of utilities, and there's a number of omissions - for example, GNU findutils, leaving the user with the maddeningly ancient Solaris find command.
Sadly, OpenSolaris is continuing what appears to be becoming a tradition in each new Solaris release, of deprecating configuration files and replacing them with new cryptic commands that store their configurations in binary files. Even ZFS mostly does away with /etc/vfstab, although it's still necessary to have a few filesystems listed there (notably, the root filesystem, swap, /dev and /proc).
A brief glance tells me that /etc/inittab has been done away with and replaced with the confusing Solaris Management Facility, /etc/inetd.conf is replaced with inetdadm, and even the /etc/{init.d,rcX.d} files are on their last legs.
I consider this to be a regression for a couple of reasons. There's considerably less risk of error when a system administrator has to edit a file and send a SIGHUP to a daemon, than if they have to issue a command to reconfigure a service. It's easy to create a backup of a configuration file before it is modified, and to later copy it back in if something goes wrong. This is problematic when forced to use commands to modify services. What files do these commands modify? How does one back-out of changes?
Furthermore, if a system is hosed, and you're in single-user mode trying to recover it, it's usually simple to work with configuration files. Editing /etc/vfstab in a console is trivial. The same can't be said of scanning the output from commands trying to make sense of a system's current setup; and if the command manipulates a binary file (as is the case with /etc/svc), the sysadmin has very little idea what's going on under the hood.
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Tracked: Jul 25, 07:29