Recently in OpenSolaris Category

As much as I'd like to try OpenSolaris, I've never even gotten it to boot all the way on any machines I have at my disposal. That's kind of a deal-breaker, not being able to actually use the operating system.

But there actually are laptops that ship preloaded with OpenSolaris. Toshiba has four of them (OK, three, but one has two configuration options).

They're pricey for the most part: $1,599, $1,199, $1,099 and a netbook that curiously dual-boots OpenSolaris and Windows XP Home for the much-lower price of $379.

I'd almost go for that $379 model, even though it ships with only 1 GB of RAM (that's a limitation that Microsoft puts on vendors who want to offer XP instead of Windows 7 on their netbooks). You can boost the memory to 2 GB for $39, and I'd probably do that.

That's if I a) had money to burn and b) used Solaris all the live-long day and really wanted the same environment on my netbook. As it stands, I don't user Solaris much at all. I do have Solaris 9 for my 1995-era Sparcstation 20, but that 55 MHz, 128 MB beast can't do all that much in Solaris or even OpenBSD. I can't run a "modern" Web browser, and I probably have a better dual-processor board in my boxes of SPARC parts, but not being able to enter the world of Firefox 3.0.x is kind of a deal-breaker.

And OpenBSD won't recognize a second CPU in SPARC 32-bit, I think. I've never had any luck running Firefox in OpenBSD or NetBSD in SPARC 32. They either won't build all the way (OpenBSD) or the available, machine-built package won't run (NetBSD).

For desktop use, anyway, I'm not hankering for what OpenSolaris is offering, but the mere fact that they do have a working Adobe Flash Player is something that most BSD projects can't quite do (except in Linux emulation and not so well at that).

However, just having a preloaded version of OpenSolaris, and on a laptop at that, is something I admire about the whole project.

One thing does worry me about the Toshiba laptops. The one-year OpenSolaris subscription is included in the laptop prices. A three-year subscription at the time of purchase is an additional $499. Ouch. Hopefully you can get software updates past one year without having to drop that additional $499.

At the risk of over-repeating myself, I do think this is pretty cool: I've always said the only way for Linux to get any traction on the desktop is with preloads. OpenSolaris is already there, at least in a limited way. Now all the project, or Sun, has to do is make the case for why desktop users should want a machine with OpenSolaris.

If you can make that case, I'm all ears.

Michael Larabel of Phoronix told me awhile ago that he was working on adding OpenBSD to his popular benchmarking application Phoronix Test Suite, and now he has an article benchmarking Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD snapshots of 6.0 Squeeze, Fedora 12, FreeBSD 7.2, FreeBSD 8.0, OpenBSD 4.6, and OpenSolaris 2009.06.

I don't think anybody expects OpenBSD to blow any doors off in terms of the usual Phoronix benchmarks. The whole mantra of the OpenBSD project is that it's not about raw speed, benchmarks, etc. Instead the focus is on correctness of code, security, cryptography and interoperability across platforms.

Here's what Larabel says in terms of his conclusion (emphasis mine):

There is a lot to gather from these benchmark results that directly compare the "out of the box" performance on Fedora, Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and OpenSolaris. If looking solely at the number of first place wins for each operating system, Fedora 12 and Debian GNU/Linux (2010-01-14) were tied with each having seven wins. Behind the Linux distributions, OpenSolaris 2009.06 and FreeBSD 8.0 were tied with each having two wins. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and FreeBSD 7.2 each had one win. OpenBSD 4.6 had not won in any of our 20 operating system benchmarks. However, in this article we are just looking at some areas of the 64-bit OS performance and depending upon the system's configuration, tweaking, compiler changes, and other optimizations these results could certainly shake out quite differently. There are also features in some operating systems that make them more favorable than others depending upon your individual needs.

So in case you were wondering about performance across OpenBSD, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, Linux (Fedora and Debian) and even the FreeBSD/Debian mashup, here are some answers.

All said, I remain interested in using FreeBSD and OpenBSD on the desktop as well as the server. I'm looking more closely at FreeBSD than I have in the past because of the project's willingness to support releases for what appears to be quite a few years. There's still a FreeBSD 6.x branch receiving updates, and that means that FreeBSD 8 has quite a life ahead of it.

The biggest stoppers for me with OpenBSD were the lack of binary updates to both base and packages during the life of a release (six months) and my general lack of ability to upgrade from one version of OpenBSD to another, either via an in-place upgrade or reinstall, without killing the whole installation in the process.

For those keeping score, I'm mostly running Debian Lenny right now, but I'm looking at the upcoming Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 as something I might want to move to later this year.