Re: Open Indiana, for a "Sun at Home" server?

Hello Derrik,

I am running it at home as a server for a while now.  I am running it as my
desktop OS at work also.  It generally works pretty well.

I'm running several zones, NFS service to my Macs.

The SunFreeware packages, or any standard Solaris packages work just fine on it.
 I just loaded up the antiword package from Sunfreeware yesterday on a couple of
systems.

The current build is build 151a.

I looked at several *Solaris distro's before deciding on OpenIndiana.
OpenIndiana best met my needs.  That aside, these are what I feel are the (very
few) negatives:

1) No Sparc releases.  I am not sure that I understand this.  I know I heard
from Sun for years that the Sparc and x86 releases where built from the same
source code tree.  I'm not a programmer, and I am sure that there is a
legitimate reason for this, I just don't know why.

2) No encrypted ZFS file systems.  This isn't Open Indiana's fault, Oracle isn't
releasing the code for this till after Solaris 11 GA is out.  None the less,
encrypted ZFS file systems are really the sole thing I really want from Solaris
11 Express.

3) Ships with a linux-y feel.  If you worked any with Sun's OpenSolaris Indiana,
OpenIndiana is just a continuation of that, so really nothing has changed.
Everything from shipping with a default bash shell, root account being disabled
by default, standard utilities hidden away and GNU stuff up front by default
really changes the feel (at least for me) of the OS.

And why this is all nit-picky stuff, it has bothered me enough that I have
created what I call my "Solaris 11 standardization document/script", to return
things back to normal.

.......

Feel free to ask additional questions if I missed something you need.

Jerry



On 10/27/11 09:53 AM,  Derrik Walker v2.0 wrote:
> I have a nice computer with a quad core AMD processor and 16 Gigs of ram that I 
> want to turn into a UNIX server.
> 
> I am trying to decide which OS to put on it. I have been using mostly RHEL at 
> work for years now, but am an old time UNIX geek.
> 
> I'm a long time fan of Solaris, but haven't had a running Sun system at home for 
> a long time.
> 
> So I was thinking Open Indiana. Anyone here running it? How does it compare to 
> real Solaris? What about FreeBSD or RHEL/Cent OS?
> 
> Can I install packages from the Solaris Freeware site on it?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> - Derrik
> 
> 
>