[PLUG-TALK] Solaris

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:33:15 -0700
John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> dijo:

>On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 23:52:50 -0700
>drew wymore <drew.wymore at gmail.com> dijo:
>
>>On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 11:49 PM, John Jason Jordan
>
>>Solaris is uber stable but does not have all of the same hardware
>>support that Linux does. If you're interested in trying it I might
>>suggest installing it in a virtual machine to give it a spin.
>
>I am downloading osol-0906-xs86/x86-64.iso now. It's a live CD. 
>
>I think I'll boot to it at the Clinic this Sunday and play with it
>there, if I have time. 

I did boot to the live CD at the Clinic, and I had half an hour to
fiddle with it. 

I noted that it installed very few of the apps that the big distros
come with - no OOo, no Gimp, etc. For folks just beginning with Linux,
or those who don't want to poke at things, that is a not good thing.
For me it might be good. I'm getting tired of having my distro give me
a cut-down version of OOo because a couple features use code that is
not open source. Or the version of the application that the distro puts
in its repos is not the one I want. 

On the other hand, Solaris might be a bit too lean for me. I spent 15
minutes trying to get it to use my bluetooth mouse, to no avail. It did
find the bluetooth device in my laptop and loaded the driver. But it
failed to install any bluetooth manager application. So I have a driver
running and no way to get it to do anything.

Contrast that with Fedora or Ubuntu. I have a cell phone that has
bluetooth but, to save battery life, its bluetooth is normally not
active. If I have taken a picture with the phone and want to upload it
to the computer all I have to do is click on the bluetooth icon in the
Gnome panel, select the phone, and the bluetooth manager automagically
wakes up the phone and displays its files in a browser window. I have
no idea what software packages make this happen, because the distro
installed them by default.

I guess I'm pretty hard to please, distro-wise. Sometimes I want
everything, and sometimes I don't want nuthin'.