Open Solaris in VirtualBox - Comparision and Usefulness
Categories: 32 bit, 64 bit, LAMP, OS, Solaris, Sun, UNIX, linux, open, seamless, virtualbox.
Open Solaris is only available in a 32bit flavor, and is well supported by Sun’s VirtualBox. When your host OS is 64bit you cannot use flash in your web browser without using nspluginwrapper, or installing a 32bit compatibility layer. Rather than having a tremendous amount of unnecessary code on your system, simply to run flash in a web browser, I prefer using a 32bit OS in a VirtualBox guest environment. Open Solaris supports seamless mode and from a graphical perspective is indistinguishable from a standard Debian based Gnome desktop.
On the backend Open Solaris is very different. Utilizing a UNIX kernel, and a custom Sun package management system there are a variety of nuances that make Open Solaris different. Aptitude, and the shorthand apt-get command is only available in Debian land, and yum is only available in Red Hat land. Open Solaris utilizes pkgadd. The following is a tabled list comparing the two package management systems:
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/documentation/apt_ips/
After getting the hang of Open Solaris a bit, it becomes functional just like Linux. Its stable like Linux, with the main advantage that it is supported by Sun Corporation.
It is probably extremely debatable whether to use a UNIX based OS or Linux. From a LAMP server environment I see little difference in functionality.
