A while back I wrote a blog entry about how I have been primarily using Ubuntu.

Meanwhile, the OpenSolaris folks continue to make progress on creating a desktop-friendly version of Solaris. I recently got a nice new Sony laptop, so after I got Windows Vista and Ubuntu working on it I decided to try installing OpenSolaris.

Unfortunately, it would not install. I think the problem is this bug, but I am not certain. I tried the work around described in the bug, but it did not work for me. Bottom line was that even after getting considerable help from some very nice OpenSolaris gurus, I could not get the install to work with the partition that I had set aside on the laptop's hard disk.

I thought I was out of luck, and then came the announcement that Sun is planning to acquire Innotek (the deal has since been finalized). I had looked at VirtualBox briefly several months ago but I did not have an immediate need for it, so I had never installed it.

Once the announcement came out, several people started experimenting with it and blogging about it. So I tried it and it worked - I am typing this blog entry into an .html file using NetBeans IDE 6.0.1, running on OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 (herein after referred to as OSDP2), which is running in a VirtualBox VM on Windows Vista.

Click the screen snapshot for a full-size version and you will see that NetBeans looks the same as it does on any other GNOME desktop (I do not know if OpenSolaris offers KDE or not...):

There were some rocks in the road. Read on for the full details....

I am using VirtualBox version 1.5.6. The first problem that I ran into was that OSDP2 would not install onto a fixed size VirtualBox virtual drive. I think that is because of a known issue in VirtualBox version 1.5.4, which is what I was using initially. The workaround is simple: I installed onto a dynamic virtual drive instead.

There were two significant problems after I installed: no network access and I could not set the video resolution of OSDP2 to anything higher than 1024x768. Alan Burlison has the solution for both problems in this blog entry. Note that by default, OSDP2 does not have an xorg.conf file - it does automatic configuration. So if you want to use the xorg.conf file that Alan provides, you will not be overwriting an existing xorg.conf - you will instead just be placing the file into /etc/X11.

Also note that in order to get the instruction that Alan provides for running the VBoxManage command to work, I had to not only shutdown the guest VM, but also the VirtualBox user interface itself.

Now comes the big question: Can I use this as my every day environment? I don't think so - not yet, anyway. The lag time as I type is very noticeable and using the mouse can be a bit frustrating. I am hoping those are just video/mouse driver problems. VirtualBox has guest operating system "Guest Additions" that help solve some of these issues. Unfortunately, there are no "Guest Additions" available for Solaris yet. Hopefully that will soon change.

In the meantime, it is good enough that I can use it to experiment with things such as the NetBeans DTrace plugin. :-)