Solaris Express 11 - quick review

Better late than never, eh? I have finally found the time to post a quick review on Solaris 11 express. Being that my previous solaris experince was with version 7, I found this version to be (as expected) a vast improvement. I installed the OS in Oracle's own Virtualbox running on my MacBook Pro. Upon first boot of the system I was presently suprised to see the GNU Grub boot loader.

After the system fully booted, I was suprised again at the amount of open source software that has made it into Solaris. The Gnome desktop that Redhat and Ubuntu users are all to familar with is standard. Other open software such as Firefox, Transmission, Pidgin, Thunderbird, and many others have all made it into the default installation, which was hardly something I expected from a distribution I previously regarded as a hard core, server OS. This could serve as a workstation or desktop OS as well. There is even a GUI software installation tool.

Desktop Screenshot:

Once I dug a bit further into the OS, I found that the similarities with familiar freeware linux distos quickly stopped. Some of the key features I discovered were zone based virtualization and the ZFS file system.

Features of the ZFS file system include snapshots, which basically takes a read-only picture of your system at a given point in time, to which you can restore your machine in the event of a failure. Similar to Apple's Time Machine, Solaris includes a tool called Time Slider which can manage these snapshots, and take automated snapshots if you'd like. ZFS also includes features such as a nearly unlimited maximum file size (16 EB). It is a 128 bit filesystem as opposed to a 64 bit filesystem like NTFS, and was intended to have limits that were unlikely to ever be reached. Its very likely this is the most advanced file system available to the average user.

Solaris zones are not a new concept, but it was new to me! Zones, also referred to as containers - is a lightweight way to implement virtualization. For example, you can have anywhere from two to 8,191 virtual Solaris machines on one physical machine, as long as your hardware has the power to support it. Each additional zone can require as little as additional 50mb of hard drive space from the physical machine, or "global" zone. This can save the operator of a server farm a great deal of money in hardware and power costs.

In closing, the new Solaris is a powerful operating system. There are a great many features in the OS that I simply did not have time to dig into unfortunately. While it is possible to download it for free for evaluation purposes, I'd still reccomend a distro such as Ubuntu or Redhat for the home or causal user, due to the ease of use and the wide availability of software available for those distros, and also the licensing. While the free Solaris offering is fully featured, you can not legally use it for anything other than evaluation without purchasing it for Oracle. However, if you would like to learn Solaris or if you are like me and just enjoy poking around in various distros, feel free to download a copy and give it a shot!

Installation screenshot:

Account Setup:

Timezone Select:

Disk configuration:

Installing...