As I said I would, I installed OpenSol­aris after I fin­ished my FOPARA paper. It cer­tainly did not go smoothly.

Jasna always com­plains about how she has bad luck with tech­no­logy; I sup­pose I have good luck. Part of that may be due to the fact that I always expect the worst. For this OpenSol­aris install, for instance, I had a whole bunch of things lis­ted off as “this should work, but I’ll assume it won’t”. If you get ten things like that and only a couple of them actu­ally do go wrong, it sort of ends up look­ing like bad luck. I had all of my data backed up at least twice, for instance — my thesis was backed up four times — and in the end I didn’t need any of it backed up, of course, but I could have.

Much of the prob­lems stemmed from the fact that Apple uses Intel’s EFI tech­no­logy instead of a BIOS or Open­Firm­ware on its Intel Macs. I am fully in sup­port of get­ting rid of the BIOS — though I’m quite a fan of Open­Firm­ware — but it caused a whole lot of prob­lems. OpenSol­aris x86 is meant to work with a BIOS. If you Google around for some­thing like “opensol­aris mac­book” you’ll find a whole cadre of pages detail­ing the con­tor­tions you have to go through to con­vince OpenSol­aris to install.

My prob­lems seemed to be worse than most. This morn­ing the OpenSol­aris Live CD abso­lutely refused to boot. I got rEFIt installed and work­ing prop­erly, I would boot up and try to load from the Live CD and rEFIt would hang. Then this after­noon I tried the exact same thing again and it worked. Is that good luck or bad luck? I never know how to cat­egor­ize “it sucked and then it got bet­ter” situations.

Things got even more bizarre. I got OpenSol­aris installed, but it would refuse to boot unless the first par­ti­tion (the EFI par­ti­tion) was marked as HFS+. If it was marked as EFI instead of HFS+ in the MBR, it would spon­tan­eously reboot. No prob­lem, you think, just mark it as HFS+ and be done with it. It gets more bizarre: if the EFI par­ti­tion is marked HFS+, rEFIt will not boot unless the OS X install­a­tion DVD is in the drive. If the DVD drive is empty or if any other DVD is in the drive, I can’t boot. I will have to look for a solution.

OpenSol­aris itself is quite rough. I’d played with it before, but I already miss the pol­ish of OS X. There’s a lot wrong with OS X, but the pol­ish is spec­tac­u­lar. There’s noth­ing miss­ing from OS X. Well, except games, but I’m not a gamer. Under OpenSol­aris I’m play­ing with a sub­set of the soft­ware avail­able for GNU/​Linux and even GNU/​Linux is lack­ing in that department.

Bey­ond the avail­able soft­ware, the sys­tem itself is a little rough. Power man­age­ment is pretty much non-​​existent. The fan’s been run­ning non-​​stop since I booted and I haven’t been using the CPU (load aver­age 0.07). There’s no sleep/​resume: the only sens­ible option I have when clos­ing the lid on the Mac­Book is to “blank the screen”. I have to use xmodmap to use Dvorak since it doesn’t ship with its own Dvorak lay­out. I can’t dis­able the track­pad. I haven’t tried yet, but I’ve heard try­ing to get audio to work is a lost cause.

With the excep­tion of a couple tech­no­lo­gies — most prom­in­ently ZFS — this is a pretty marked step down from the creature com­forts of OS X, but I knew what I was get­ting into. I don’t know if I’ll be using OpenSol­aris full time, but I’m going to make a good go of it. Soft­ware free­dom is import­ant to me. I like being in con­trol of my oper­at­ing sys­tem. I’m start­ing to remem­ber what it was like to rely on free soft­ware, before I left GNU/​Linux five years ago. It’s a pretty good feeling.

And yes, I’m so excited I took pic­tures of the event. I’m a nerd.

As I said I would, I installed OpenSolaris after I finished my FOPARA paper. It certainly did not go smoothly. Jasna always complains about how she has bad luck with technology; I suppose I have good luck. Part of that may be due to the fact that I always expect the worst. For this ...