[OpenIndiana-discuss] I figured this deserved a separate thread

[Gabriel de la Cruz]

Hi,

I have a few servers running hardened Gentoo, and I feel terribly excited
with DragonflyBSD, I was administering a purely mac enviroment for quite
some time...

But I run opensolaris seamlessly from my 2 racks, untill my travel netbook
(including my office). According to my taste it is a hell of a desktop, and
more resistant than anything I know.  I do believe it is the best OS to run
windows virtually, and office people learned easily how to roll back their
local zfs snapshots and fetching fresh windows VMs from their pools in case
there is something broken (I don't even think they really need windows, but
it is what they know best so..). All of it rather manually and without great
integration efforts, just with networking , database, file servers...the
desktop machines are very straightforward.
I dont see any reason to consider it a bad desktop ;-P

We run graphic applications mostly on mac, cause designers has the apple
mind desease, but I have 2 stations running Adobe apps on virtual XP over
Opensoalris as well... in real production, it works well, with a fully
calibrated graphic monitor. Let say it does what Adobe does on a mac but
with a zfs pool in the backend, and some nice flexibility provided by
virtualization. The guys can take their virtual image with them if they
like. The graphics are really ok, no great penalty.

The netbook runs well, including the eyecandy from the graphic interface.
Earlier I was using a fully encripted gentoo system, but I got a warning
while traveling as encription is still illegal at some countries, so
Opensolaris is safe enough... But I would love to have a netbook with 2
hardrives... My IBM (lenovo) laptop had an extra bay and I had a very safe
ZFS pool... That laptop got tragically smashed (mostly the display), shame
on me, but the data is with me still.
My favorite game is Lord of Ultima, and since it is browser based.. runs as
well.
I like watching movies, that was easier before lifewithsolaris.jp took away
the free codecs... but I never tried purchasing the Fluendo option.

umm anyway... what to say... It is already a good desktop, no matter how you
look at it.
Maybe as media player is not so easy platform, but I see no a need to go
Ubuntu...

Love
Gab



On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 10:20 AM, Gary Driggs <gdriggs at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Nov 4, 2010, at 4:41 PM, "Kevin J. Woolley" wrote:
> > CentOS and other enterprise-grade Linuxes also upgrade well among minor
> releases, but need to be re-installed to go to the next major release.
>  Those release cycles are suitably long that I'd argue the net effect is
> negligible.
>
> I have one each of RHEL & CentOS that were dist upgraded from v3 to 4
> without issue.
>
> > Fedora, most Ubuntu (minus LTS), and many other Linux distros have much
> shorter release cycles and don't make any claims that they upgrade well
> among actual releases (as opposed to repo updates, etc.).
>
> You have twice suggested that Fedora is a production OS when it is not --
> it's equivalent to a BSD current, testing or unstable Debian, or Solaris
> Express. That is, it's where new features are added & tested before moving
> in to the "enterprise" distribution regardless of whether it's on a desktop
> or server.
>
> > For what it's worth I don't believe I've ever upgraded a Solaris box
> across major versions, so I don't have any direct experience there.
>
> I haven't tried it since Solaris 2.6-8 -- and then only on a personal
> workstation but at the time it was one of only a handful of operating
> systems that had a solid track record for being able to do so without issue
> 99% of the time or better. OS X can't yet match that across major versions
> but they seem to be making an effort to match the reputation that Solaris
> had (still has?) in this area.
>
> I'd be curious to learn how many admins feel this is an important feature
> since my server OS upgrade cycles tend to coincide with hardware upgrades &
> in that case it's more work to try to preserve an exact replica of the old
> system it's replacing  -- except, perhaps, in the case of a physical to
> virtual conversion.
>
> Again, workstations or lab/dev/QA systems are another matter depending on
> their level of importance (e.g. my production workstation lately lags behind
> by a year or two but my notebook gets a quarterly facelift at a minimum).
>
> -Gary
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