First Look at OSol 2008.05!

Guys,

I am really excited to see what all opportunities we have now, as OSol is out with its latest build as well as, new website - cool website, soothing to the eyes!

Anyways, after a grand opening night at Community One! Lets get down to work, I was so excited to try it out, as I have already been lucky to get my hands on the OSol RC0, one month prior to its official unveiling!

Well, I was so excited to see the announcement, that I downloaded the ISO, even though I was getting not the best of the bandwidth for downloading.

It took me nearly 15 hours, to finally get my hands on the newest build! Also, xVM VirtualBox 1.6 was out, so it was perfect way to get started. I referred to this well designed documentation, Getting Started with OSol 2008.05 using Virtual Box, to really jump-start with OSol.

I made all the necessary configuration, created a new Virtual Machine, dynamically-expandable Virtual Disk Image and USB support. Still, I was disappointed, as I couldn't run the VM on my Windows XP Professional SP2, with 512 MB RAM (host), 3.0 Ghz Intel Pentium IV Processor!

I have been using Virtual Box since it was acquired by Sun, i.e. innotek Virtual Box 1.5.6! Today, I use xVM Virtual Box 1.6 and was glad to see support for lot more OS's, also it made backup for previous VM's too. Anyways, I lost the excitement, and looked for ways to get started with OSol 2008.05.

Few days later, VMware (Player) came out with support for OSol 2008.05 and I got the appliance from my friend who downloaded it, it was 7-zip archive which got unzipped into 8 GB, I don't have much idea about that, as I tried running it once with the VMware Player!

Its Ubuntu-like OS, with obviously some amazing tools like IPS, ZFS, etc. I am still exploring it, though from the website. Also, I have posted a question concerned with the disappointment I had, for technical details refer that post, on opensolaris forums. If you can help, please reply there!

This is being submitted for review to the blogging contest - Student Reviews NetBeans 6.1 and OpenSolaris!
Author - Varun Nischal, University - JIIT University