I Still Really Want to Try OpenSolaris

April 14, 2007 0 By Tad Reeves

imageUnfortunately for me, I’ve still been unable to get OpenSolaris 2009.06 to work for me, in any capacity.

It’s a shame, because I’m a total Sun fan, and would love to be able to start rolling with it – just I keep running into dorky issues that I would have figured would have been ironed out already.  And, unfortunately for me, I’m in the middle of trying to get things done, and don’t have the time to fiddle with this to make it work for me. 

When last I tried OpenSolaris, it was about a month ago when I was trying to get a good Unix/Linux install working on my laptop for development purposes.   Unfortunately, I couldn’t get OpenSolaris to properly work with my HP Pavilion dv7’s Atheros 2425 WiFi controller.  So, with no network connectivity, I was a bit out of luck on using Solaris on that box.

Then, today I needed to set up a dev ColdFusion server, so figured I’d give OpenSolaris another try, and see if I could fire it up in a VirtualBox VM.  However, that ended abruptly and badly, as I immediately got a series of kernel panic messages all over the screen, and the installation aborted before I could even get it underway. 

image As a note, I tried it with OpenSolaris 2009.06 and 2008.11, tried it with PAE on and off, tried labelling it as 64 bit or not, etc – all with the same result.  Just bombs out immediately. 

So, I’m back to running Fedora – something I know will work without a hitch in a VirtualBox VM. 

I would have thought, though, that someone from the OpenSolaris project might have already tested & worked the bugs out of running OpenSolaris in a VirtualBox VM – seeing as VirtualBox is owned by Sun now, and it’s the easiest tool any of us have for trying out a new OS.  Hell, even Windows 7 worked great in a VirtualBox VM. 

Hopefully my luck can improve on this, though, as I’d still really like to try OpenSolaris.