Hi everyone, I downloaded & tried both the OpenSolaris 2008.11 Live CD & the Fedora-10 x86-64 DVD. My primary OS is Windows XP. My CPU/GPU is Athlon64 X2 3600+/GeForce 6150SE(Onboard). I’ll be doing some basic OpenGL/OpenGLUT programming. Please tell me which is the better choice? OpenSolaris or Fedora?. I know both were Community-driven OSes. And I know Fedora has a very high usage/support compared to OpenSolaris, but I liked OpenSolaris more when i tried both.
Anyway, I’m not familiar outside the windows world. So can u people please discuss about the pros & cons of using Both?. And most importantly which will be the easier OS for a novice OpenGL programmer like me?. Thanks.
“Fedora has a very high usage/support compared to OpenSolaris” that pretty much summed it.
I don’t know anything about opensolaris, but I found that Ubuntu is easier than fedora when coming from the windows world.
Googling “ubuntu problem with XXX” very easily gives a solution.
You have the chance that Nvidia has drivers for both linux and solaris, but I have no idea about their performance or stability on OpenSolaris. Linux is very well supported by nvidia though.
On the strict “easier OS for a novice OpenGL programmer”, it will be very much the same (X, unix-like…)
I’m as green as they come when it comes to Linux, and even I could get Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE to run with GL. So if it’s a question of ease, no worries either way.
Don’t know diddly about Solaris, probably even less than Zbuffer.
Fedora may have an edge if you want to tinker with the PS3 stuff (short of going with Yellow Dog).
I tried Ubuntu, Fedora & OpenSolaris. Ubuntu is very watered down. I don’t like it even though many prefer it. Then I found Fedora extremely good. It has very large number apps. But somehow OpenSolaris 2008.11 struck me. Even as I was running from the Live CD, the OS detected my GPU and loads the latest NVIDIA driver - very slick & neat. Then it has the ‘Device Driver’ utility which is from the heaven. It detects all my hardware & gives a ‘tick’ if it has all the required drivers. Very very impressive. Then I saw the Intel Graphics Video from the OpenSolaris website where Intel has a lot of work going on in the Mesa/GLX area for OpenSolaris. Very very compelling. I’ll be asking my friends to try Ubuntu, Fedora & OpenSolaris and come out with a clear opinion.
Ubuntu is “Linux for Humans” like they call it sometimes. Solaris is rather for nuclear power plants.
Solaris has not many advantages on the desktop but scales very well for high availability systems. (ZFS is also a damn cool technology but who has five harddiscs in his notebook?)
OpenSolaris is a bit more of a desktop system but it is still a bit like apples and oranges to compare it with Ubuntu
OpenSolaris is a server as well as a desktop/workstation system.
e.g. OpenSolaris is used in Sun’s “open storage” hardware (thanks to ZFS and other goodies) and is also very fine in workstation environment.
Solaris 10’s code is derived from OpenSolaris code-base.
e.g. “Solaris 11” will represent some future snapshot of OpenSolaris.
OpenSolaris is more dynamic in that the hot new technologies are test driven in OpenSolaris-based distributions and when these technologies have stabilised they then enter the “Solaris X” product through patching/upgrade framework.
You do not need multiple hard discs to take advantage of ZFS.
ZFS is a new/versatile filesystem very useful for the general computing experience as well as advanced computing experience.
e.g. ZFS allows a patched/upgraded system to be easily rolled back to a previous state.
–> Say you have system A, you then upgrade it to System B. However, you find some driver/etc. in System B have compromised your system. With OpenSolaris, you are able to rollback to System A with no sweat. Here each “system” has it’s own boot environment (BE) which is selectable from OpenSolaris’ GRUB menu. BE’s can be deleted, created, etc. and a single BE represents a separate version of OpenSolaris. A BE only contains the minimal files required to boot/init an OpenSolaris session (does not clone your data) and so BE’s are relatively lightweight. A BE is automatically created after upgrading a system and this makes system upgrades easy for novice user.
Solaris/OpenSolaris has many technologies that Linux can only dream of or is trying to clone. The SunStudio developer tools are free and rock. DTrace is powerful stuff and is also accessible from programmer tools.
OpenSolaris is a fantastic development environment.
The NVidia driver/OpenGL support is supposed to be 1st class like Linux (in case you don’t realise, OpenSolaris/Solaris are serious platforms). OpenSolaris uses the Gnome desktop and with my Quadro nvidia card I also have the compiz-3d effects on and these effects are fine.
OpenSolaris has the free sun-studio programming tools (compiler, debugger, etc.) and once using them you would not want to go back to gcc/g++/gdb/etc.
OpenSolaris has it’s own free package management system.
If doing only basic coding then at least pick a free unix that installs the easiest on your system.
However, if you ever envisage your coding to become serious and potentially a career option then I suggest give opensolaris a whirl. It is a very mature environment.
