I am typing this from the OpenSolaris 2008.11 live CD.

Despite seeing many benchmarks where Ubuntu outperforms it in most areas that area relevant to a laptop this is not my experience.

Everything seems very fast, even internet pages. This site for example loaded as close to immediately as I can imagine.

I guess the next could be put down to a better NIC driver but everything else seems to be better optimised than Ubuntu. Annoyance is that my Wireless card doesn't work but I have a second card I could try. The system fonts are horrible too, even our Cheesy website suffers under these.

I know Mr Retto has been playing with it, has anybody else had experience with OpenSolaris? Are there any show stopping annoyances?

Hey, told you so.

OpenSolaris axed by Ellison

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October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. Other dangerous months are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.
-Mark Twain-

I think that is sad. I'm a bit worried ZFS will end up being one of those things that made perfect sense, was the best way of doing things but never took off. The betamax of file systems.

I was looking forward to ZFS being included in OS X, but it was quietly dropped. There may have been technical problems at that stage but my money was on licensing issues.

A comment from a year ago shows that the time frame is right. The author missed the point when he mentioned DEC, for DEC had an excellent database (Rdb) which they sold to Oracle in 1994. Oracle promptly jacked the Rdb prices way up, and the runtime component of Rdb which had been included with all VMS systems suddenly cost a lot, killing it for many software developers and customers alike.

Oracle/Rdb as it became known was ported to Windows, but that port didn't make an official release. Lack of support for the compilers was blamed, but this was seen as a weak excuse by those who understood the technical issues. Licensing and pressure from Microsoft were more likely the cause (Compaq were the owners of the DEC stuff by this stage and they were very pro-MS).

In the light of that I'm sceptical about the future of MySQL under Oracle's ownership. PostgreSQL anybody?

__________________
October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. Other dangerous months are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.
-Mark Twain-

It looks as though I was right - Oracle kills low-priced MySQL support

__________________
October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. Other dangerous months are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.
-Mark Twain-

Ok Unix boys,

I either join the girls playing animated graphics on their Macs or install a flava of Linux and run some useful man's software. Whats the most user friendly (open source) bundle ?

BigD

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www.shootingthecheese.ch
The place for fun and chat in Switzerland.

I do beg your pardon?! Even Bill Gates says Macs are serious computers...

YouTube - Everyone likes Apple Computers, even Bill Gates!!

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My blogs: about food and Zurich 1200 fountains

You'll be after Ubuntu Ubuntu homepage | Ubuntu

They have got a hell of a lot right. It's not up there with OSX yet but it is a lot faster, put in on an old laptop and you'll see what I mean. At the moment Win7 is an also ran.

My advice would be to download Ubuntu Live and give it a whirl. You boot off the cd, nothing gets installed on your pc and if you don't like it you just shutdown, throwaway the disk and buy my old MacBook air off me :-)