Which distro?

[Dark Atheist]

i mean for stuff like tv cards wireless etc

 

[X-Istence]

Wireless is excellent. Dun know nor care about TV cards.

 

[Dark Atheist]

i do - so that might be a minus for it right there, i will do so research and see

here is the HCL if anyone is interested on checking their hardware

 

[LordOfLA]

solaris was until recently a server OS so they didn't concentrate on things you were unlikely to find in a server.

It's used by a lot of banks for managing all the financial transactions, etc that go on every day alongside Oracle for the database side of things.

 

[Dark Atheist]

well spare pc i have is used as a file server(storage)/htpc for when i a, doing large 3d renders on this the main pc, so i would need it to be able to handle that, still i will keep it in mind for the other spare pc i have

 

[X-Istence]

solaris was until recently a server OS so they didn't concentrate on things you were unlikely to find in a server.

It's used by a lot of banks for managing all the financial transactions, etc that go on every day alongside Oracle for the database side of things.

OpenSolaris is making great strides to start competing with Linux on the desktop (think Ubuntu crowd), right now OpenSolaris is still a little difficult to get into, however they really have come a long way since 2008.05, the 2008.11 release is absolutely fantastic and was a pleasure to install and work with. On my file server I turned off the graphical aspect off course, since it just needs to serve files, but even with gnome it was smooth, fast, and supported almost all of my hardware out of the box (one network card did not work, an Marvell chipset Yukon driver).

Wireless support has been improved as has the network manager. The thing about OpenSolaris is that it is still very much a Unix system underneath and has many many cool features for the more geeky people. Dtrace, zones, ZFS off course. ZFS has been nicely abstracted into a Apple Time Machine like interface called TimeSlider which allows one to go back and forth in revisions and snapshots that are taken with ZFS.

Toshiba recently made an agreement with Sun that they would start selling laptops with OpenSolaris pre-installed on it. Which is absolutely awesome, as this is going to lead the way to becoming more and more known. Companies like Adobe have long had flash support for Solaris, and thus OpenSolaris can benefit from that, along with a very strong Java platform, and off course OpenOffice it is a very good desktop OS for the user that just needs some word editing capabilities, email and off course browsing.

Gaming on OpenSolaris is non-existent and many programs that work under Linux will not work under OpenSolaris, even if recompiled since they rely on Linuxisms. Linuxisms is where the developers assume a certain extension to the POSIX or other standards that exist, also exists on every other platform. This is a frequent source of headaches for developers of other platforms who want to also use the application. Enough of a tangent, gaming on OpenSolaris will take longer to become a reality than it becoming a reality for Linux where certain games already run natively.

OpenSolaris is an interesting addition to the already many choices that people have in terms of what OS to run. It has opened a whole new competition in terms of file systems, and many OS's have been porting many of the cooler features from OpenSolaris in an attempt to create industry wide measurement/tracing tools (Dtrace). I look forward to the many improvements that Sun and other contributors are making to OpenSolaris and hope it continues to thrive and move forward.

 

[dreamliner77]

Well, I got fedora running again. I'm gonna play with this for a while, but I think I'm also going to check out opensolaris.

 

[Gigabot]

Well, I got fedora running again. I'm gonna play with this for a while, but I think I'm also going to check out opensolaris.

Did you give Linux Mint a try? http://linuxmint.com/ they have a live CD you can try.

 

[binoyxj]

Fedora is always my favorite.....