OpenSolaris 2008/05 on VirtualBox
Markus Thielmann — Sun, 2008-05-11
In opposite to older releases, VirtualBox 1.6.0 seems to be quite stable and fast.
Since it's now Sun's property, I thought it might be a good idea to test OpenSolaris Indiana as a guest system.
Indiana is Sun's new "default" OpenSolaris Distribution. It's a full-fledged desktop operating system, including a Gnome-Desktop, a live-CD and a graphical installer.
Booting from VirtualBox is really simple, OpenSolaris uses Grub as boot-manager. One drawback: OpenSolaris Grub detects a already installed windows system, but it doesn't add already installed Linux Distributions to the boot-manager.
The Live-CD did start without any problems, however it took quite a time on my not-so-new equipment. While a Ubuntu Hardy VM starts in two or three minutes, it took Indiana nearly 15 minutes to present a graphical desktop.
The installer places a icon on the desktop. It reminds me of ubiquity, the Debian and Ubuntu installer.
Quite surprisingly, OpenSolaris does not support user names longer than eight characters.
While installing, I also tested Firefox and especially Flash support. I was unaware, that Adobe already released Flash 9 for OpenSolaris, since there's still no Flash for BSD systems.
I really like Sun's effort around the OpenSolaris based Gnome desktop. It works flawlessly, everything seems work out of the box. I think I'm going to free some space on my disk to test it for a longer period of time.
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