First of all, thanks to everyone who commented on my previous OpenSolaris entry (which wasn’t really positive at all).
I recently tried again – this time starting with an ISO of build 93. I’d recommend completely ignoring the 2008.05 release and going straight for the build 93 image.
Installed easily in VirtualBox, adding the VirtualBox extensions was easy. Select “Devices -> Install Guest Additions” in the VirtualBox menu, then when logged into the OpenSolaris install, do the following:
su
pkgadd -d /media/VBOXADDITIONS_1.6.0_30421/VBoxSolarisAdditions.pkg
(you then say yes, i really do want to install it. rather obvious. I had to do this step again after the “pkg image-update” below though). Just logging out and then back in again gets you all the awesomeness you’d expect from running other guests (such as that system released by a large corporation in Redmond).
The “pkg image-update” went as expected, and I’m now running build 94.
I installed SunStudio Express (compilers) pretty easily – “pkg install sunstudio”. Unfortunately, this is all in /opt/SunStudioExpress and not in $PATH, which would have been much more useful. I guess there’s still a bit to go before usability nirvana. Also, no .desktop entries, so have to explicitly run /opt/SunStudioExpress/bin/sunstudio to get the NetBeans gui. Presumably if i add /opt/SunStudioExpress/bin to PATH, building random software packages will be nicer.
So, I then want bzr so i can pull source repositories. Monty Taylor informs me that the magic packages you want are: SUNWgcc, gcc-dv and SUNWtoo. Then you can build bzr as downloaded from the website. Installed these easily.
However, now trying to get the bzr source:
$ firefox
ld.so.1: firefox-bin: fatal: /usr/lib/firefox/libxul.so: corrupt or truncated file
and then symbol kPStaticModules: referenced symbol not found.
So maybe I shouldn’t have upgraded to build 94…..
But certainly in much better shape than the may release, but be warned, it’s still a work-in-progress and some things may sporadically not work from time to time (e.g. like firefox and now).
Hopefully, some time soon I’ll get a MySQL build (well… really I want MySQL Cluster, and later drizzle) going and will really be able to hammer these things with dtrace.
Totally agree we can do a better job with the Sun Studio and Netbeans integration – in fact, those packages haven’t been touched since we integrated them for 2008.05! Unfortunately the Firefox problem is a known bug with corruption of the downloaded package (http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=67975&tstart=0). As far as the package naming, yes, it sucks donkeys. While we have no short term plans in doing a bunch of package refactoring, at some stage in the hopefully not too distant future, things should be a great deal better. Always nice to hear you experiences – please update us on what else sucks!!
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