Open Solaris in VirtualBox - Comparision and Usefulness

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.

OS Reinstall is First Thing to do

If you are experiencing issues with your computer, and are unable to do any subsequent software configuration, the first thing to do is reinstall your operating system. Back up everything on your computer to a USB hard drive; there should be no worries as this is a typical procedure. Independent of a Windows, Linux, Unix, or BSD system, OS re-installation is another standard procedure. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve reinstalled an operating system only to find increase system stability and performance.