I must say, I think this Operating System
is slow as shit. I am used to ArchLinux,
that is responsive on my machine. But
OpenIndiana is slow, even when I compare
it to that Microsoft OS.
Another problem I showed up was running
low on Swap space. During installation, I was
only asked for one partition. Since this is a
Solaris OS, it created slices within this
partition.
It turned out, it was using only a swap
of 512 MB, while my system has 1024 MB
of physical memory available.
A quick google told me, resizing the swap
can be done on the fly.
http://blogs.corenetworks.es/2009/08/how-to-dynamically-increase-zfs-swap-space/
This solved the out of memory problems
I was experiencing in the packet manager.
Still, the OS responses slowly, and the
pre-compiled software availability is
rather low (compared to an Linux distro)
Some more software is available from
http://www.blastwave.org/ but it seems
there is outdated software in on there.
For example vlc version 0.8.6f, which
appearently has problem with the playback
of the MPEG4 codec. It’s not the video
output since videos using the h264 codec
have correct playback.
I was thinking about compiling the current
version of VLC for my OpenIndiana, but I’ m
note sure, this Operating System feels so
unresponsive that it’s no fun anymore.
Looking at http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20100927
The 1 GB of RAM might be the cause for the slow responses of this OS. Is this OS really even memory-hungrier then the Microsoft OS?
(now, there is a problem with my mainboard which makes it impossible to add more memory to my desktop machine)
Well, Open Indiana does use the Java Desktop with Gnome. Also, ZFS itself tends to need lots of RAM. I would try with at least 2GB, but I would recommend a minimum of 4GB. Even on a single-processor Celeron 900 (2.2 GHz), it feels responsive enough. But then, I have 4GB of RAM.
Here is some output from prtdiag:
System Configuration:
TOSHIBA Satellite L305
BIOS Configuration: INSYDE 2.10 09/23/2009
Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 900 @ 2.20GHz CPU
I have compiled some software that I needed. Created /usr/local with zfs create. The software I compiled so far was ruby 1.9.2, and also ruby-gtk2. Went real smooth. You just have to make sure to install gtk2 through the package mananger, as well as gcc, gmake, bison, etc., because compiling glib2 was a huge PITA here. Ruby and ruby-gtk2 was no big deal.
But yeah, you'll want a nice bit of RAM to get ZFS running adequately. That way, you won't have to worry about swap size.
I prefer to compile my own software which isn't in the stock repository, because the stuff on Blastwave is out of date, and also, the stuff that's there, some of it wasn't compiled with the options that I wanted. For example, Gnumeric didn't have support for reading ODS files.
Thanks, but as I pointed out, it's impossible to upgrade my ram on that machine. I might try it when I have some other suitable machine available.
You can have a very responsive machine with 1GB RAM.