[advocacy-discuss] 2 Reviews

[Philip Torchinsky]

Both reviews are too small; I installed OpenSolaris 2008.05 yesterday 
and upgraded it to OpenSolaris 2008.11 with pkg image-update and had 
more impressions :)

I found the following:

1. Important notice about grub update for those who upgrade from b_86 to 
b_93 is not easy to locate (it was NOT in release notes - please, add it 
there those who can)
(see 
http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=66391&tstart=0&start=0). 
I had bad hour trying to guess why new boot environment reboots 
constantly instead of normal boot -because of that issue with GRUB.

2. Update took 1 hour 20 minutes for me because pkg image-update 
downloaded 1,5 G of data. It looked odd to me - download 1,5G to update 
a system freshly installed with 640M CD.

3. Russian translation of the installer is nearly acceptable, but 
sometimes inaccurate badly (translators were in a hurry, and it's 
noticeable).

On the other hand, I enjoyed my Acer Ferrari 5000 works well out of the 
box right after correct update to OpenSolaris 2008.11: everything 
necessary was there: Firefox, Thunderbird, all drivers (including 
sound), software for playing and grabbing music, videodriver for ATI 
X1600, Pidgin, Evince... I actually get the system ready to work in two 
hours (counting installation + update time), and it's perfect! 
OpenOffice 2.4 takes just 400 M to download, and works very well.

Installation process was very comfortable to me; no stupid errors with 
rewriting partition table were made; I had dual-boot configuration, and 
still have it without any problem. I backed up my user files, just 
tar'ing home directory, and restored it just untar'ing them into new 
directory in the new system (I had Solaris Express before). Bookmarks, 
mail and browser configurations remained the same, and I like new system 
performance - no delays were noticed in relations to file system.

Philip


Jim Grisanzio wrote:
> Found 2 reviews and posted them to http://opensolaris.org/os/news/. Are 
> they accurate based on your experience? I have not upgraded to 93 yet.
>
> An Early Look At OpenSolaris 2008.11 | 07/15/2008
> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=opensolaris_200811_early&num=1
>
> Solaris Express Community Edition Build 93 | 07/12/2008
> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=sun_sxce_b93&num=1
>
> Jim
>
>