A look at OpenSolaris… (Update)
Update on 2008-05-05: the stable release of OpenSolaris (2008.05) ships the pcn driver, updated the according section in this blog entry.
% cat /etc/release
Solaris Express Community Edition snv_87 X86
Copyright 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.
Assembled 07 April 2008
Well, I wanted to take a look at the Release Candidate of Opensolaris 2008.05 but decided to start with Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) – Build 87 instead. You know: OpenSolaris -> SXCE -> SXDE -> Solaris 10 (german readers should take a look at Joerg Moellenkamps ‘Welches Solaris‘).
I’ve installed Solaris inside Virtualbox (version 1.5.6_OSE) on a grml64 system (providing 1GB RAM to the virtual machine). First impression: just a few questions in the installer. Though the first error message pops up just after a few seconds:
Installation done:
In the meanwhile download of OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 finished and I booted it, again using Virtualbox:
Problem: the AMD PCnet network driver is not part of the relase. Switching to “Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (82540EM)” doesn’t help either because Debian’s OpenSource-Version of Virtualbox does not ship support for e1000 (see /usr/share/doc/virtualbox-ose/README.Debian and #479093).
Update: OpenSolaris 2008.05 (snv_86_rc3_X86) ships the pcn driver for the AMD PCnet32 network device. Works inVMware out-of-the-box:
No other problems so far (though I don’t like the fact to be prompted for keyboard layout during bootup), but I can verify the fact that OpenSolaris does not ship a c/c++ compiler, whereas SXCE provides the gcc 3.4.3 and Sun C 5.9 compilers. Dear sun, how about shipping a compiler instead of Mahjongg and >10 other GNOME games? 8-)
Useful resources: