I spent the weekend working with OpenSolaris on both Sparc and x86. After a few trial runs it became dead easy to build OpenSolaris. Really. It is simple. I have to take my hat off to the pilot team on this project because we are working with millions of lines of source. The complete build and then kernel update and reboot takes about 3 hours total on a decent machine. That means that, from start to finish, you will need about 4 hours to install the OS completely, compile your own and then reboot. If you take another hour to install the GNOME and KDE desktop from Blastwave then you need 6 hours total. Not bad when you consider that you will spend most of that watching a movie while your computer does the hard work. Just as soon as I can slip the surly bonds of the NDA I will document the complete set of steps to take that will get you to where I am right now.

Here are some screenshots of the final result on my home system :


Some people swear by CDE and for them, well, its still there.



The “Sun Java Desk Top” is pretty much GNOME on steroids. It just works and is much better looking in every measurable way than CDE. I am happy to report that when I boot this build of OpenSolaris that everything seems to work as expected and is perfectly functional.

    
Choice. That seems to be a big word these days. I simply decided that I would install every available desktop option that I had within easy reach for no other reason than “choice” and “testing”. Well this is the GNOME 2.8.1 package that is maintained by Michael Gernoth here at Blastwave.

    
“Eye candy” and “cool” are also good words. The KDE 3.3.1 package is maintained by Ken Mays and I just happen to love it. I live with KDE in front of me and I simply think that anything that makes a twelve year old pre-teen drop his X-Box and say “cool” has to be a really slick piece of kit.

Is there a serious side to all of this? Yes.

Sun Microsystems Inc.   SunOS 5.10.1    blastwave       Apr. 30, 2005
SunOS Internal Development:  dclarke 2005-04-30 [blastwave]
bfu'ed from /export/blastwave/archives/sparc/nightly on 2005-05-01
Sun Microsystems Inc.   SunOS 5.10      Generic January 2005
# uname -a
SunOS c0ffee 5.10.1 blastwave sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-Enterprise
# psrinfo -v
Status of virtual processor 0 as of: 05/02/2005 01:41:28
  on-line since 05/01/2005 01:20:58.
  The sparcv9 processor operates at 400 MHz,
        and has a sparcv9 floating point processor.
Status of virtual processor 1 as of: 05/02/2005 01:41:28
  on-line since 05/01/2005 01:21:03.
  The sparcv9 processor operates at 400 MHz,
        and has a sparcv9 floating point processor.
Status of virtual processor 4 as of: 05/02/2005 01:41:28
  on-line since 05/01/2005 01:21:03.
  The sparcv9 processor operates at 400 MHz,
        and has a sparcv9 floating point processor.
Status of virtual processor 5 as of: 05/02/2005 01:41:28
  on-line since 05/01/2005 01:21:03.
  The sparcv9 processor operates at 400 MHz,
        and has a sparcv9 floating point processor.
#

Myself and James Dickens also built OpenSolaris on a quad processor E4000 such that we could do application and database testing. Stay tuned for further updates and reports as they become available.

Dennis Clarke
Admin & Director
Blastwave.org