I install Solaris 11 in VirtualBox, and attempt to review it!

Hi,

See this post for my Elementary OS Review.

In this post, I’ll be reviewing Oracle Solaris by installing and testing it in virtualbox. This might be interesting, because I have absolutely no idea how to use Solaris 😛

The review is primarily a video, but as before I’ll write it down too if you don’t want to/can’t watch the video.

The Installation

Took forever. I restarted the first time because I thought it had crashed, but it hadn’t. It look fairly nice as it was running on GNOME 2, but that’s about all that happened here. To see how to install, watch the video.

The Review

So, I rebooted, and waited for Solaris to boot. And waited. And waited. The boot took about 4 minutes, somehow. Then I logged in and installed the virtualbox guest additions, which was very fast. After rebooting again (quickly this time), I started to explore.

Having used Linux for a while, I was happy to see GNOME 2 again, and had a look at the themes, and they had a nice blue one so I picked that. Next up was seeing what software came preinstalled, which was almost nothing, sadly, so I looked for an office program. Apparently, there are none, but the other software e.g. Python, seems up to date. I had a quick look at a few other things, but ultimately there wasn’t much to talk about, annoyingly.

Conclusion

Solaris takes a long to install! And don’t try to use it as a consumer operating system, because that software is apparently thin on the ground, though it’s hardly surprising. This one was a bit boring and anti-climatic, but hopefully the OpenBSD one will be better, see you then 🙂

Hamish

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About Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty

I'm a self-employed software developer working on Free Software projects, as well as studying for my degree with the Open University. Being pedantic when it comes to detail is fortunately useful for both of these things! A strong believer in free software, I have a few pay-for programs available under the GPLv3 and enjoy reporting bugs and helping to improve various open source projects, including volunteering at Wimborne Model Town to work on their river control system.

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