There and back again

Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away there has been OpenSolaris distribution. This was the first Unix-like desktop which allowed me to completely replace Windows on my desktop. It wasn't perfect, but a magic of ZFS and IPS made it very attractive. As we now, the sun sets... So, with the end of OpenSolaris era I've moved to FreeBSD and has never regretted about it.

But I always liked illumos and was interested in OpenIndiana distribution. So, now, when I seem to be one of the last interested in it, I tried to go back. Really, migration was smooth. I've bought Nvidia GeForce 740-based video adapter, 4 more GB of RAM and after this I was sure that my hardware is supported by OI.

OI could recognize FreeBSD ZFS pool, so I've detached one disk from zpool, installed OI Hipster from October ISO, imported data and looked at software. As always, software choice for OI if you don't want to compile it yourself is not wast. Yes, there are pkgsrc builds, but they seems foreign in IPS world. So, I used sfe and sfe-encumbered repositories for OI /dev. I hope to use vlc, but vlc 1.1 from sfe-encumbered was a complete garbage. It didn't want to play anything or when it played something it was awful (like no sound or no video or no navigation in DVD menu...) So I stopped on totem/rhythmbox combination and used additional gstreamer codecs from sfe-encumbered. This works, however you should set sfe-encumbered before sfe in your publisher's list.

When speaking about OI one should mention IIMF/IIMD and other IIIM shit. Luckily, it can be turned off. I've finished just adding setxkbmap command to the list of startup applications.

Unfortunately, our Apache OpenOffice from /hipster is still buggy, so I had to use one from AdfinisSyGroup. VirtualBox 4.3.18 from Oracle for Solaris/x64 works fine. I was pleased with our Firefox 24.8.1. Adobe flash plugin 10.1 r85 sometimes crashes. Especially annoying is that it crashes on the flash games which I have to support. At least I've expected that it would not work - the application require Flash 11+. But for other use cases it works. Having working evince, xchm and FBreader seems enough to read documentation. zpool resilvering has completed by 50%. So, now I'm eating my own dog's food.