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OpenSolaris Student Edition

By David Stewart (Intel) (138 posts) on November 3, 2008 at 4:41 pm

If you are a student (or know a student), I have some good news for you.

One of the nifty little things I got my hands on last month was the OpenSolaris Student Pack. It’s a very nice packaging of the OS to get your feet as wet as you like.

• Disc 1 – This is the current OpenSolaris 2008.05 Live CD. It’s bootable… just slip it in your CD drive if your system is set up to boot from the CD, reboot your system and you should eventually see the OpenSolaris desktop. If you want to actually install it, just hit the install icon and away you go. OS includes Gnome-based desktop, package management system, and essential technologies such as ZFS, SMF, FMA (optimized for Intel Xeon Processors, I might add) and Dtrace.
• Disc 2 – is a DVD which includes VirtualBox and a virtual image of an already installed OpenSolaris 2008.05 system. VirtualBox is the open source desktop-oriented virtualization software (think Parallels) which allows you to run different OS’s (Linux, Windows, Solaris) on top of a broad variety of “host” OS’s, including Mac OSX, Solaris, Windows and Linux.

This latter bit is actually really cool. Let’s say you wanted to kick the tires on more than just the basic OS. A more complete set up which includes some development environments for Java or C++ or OpenOffice doesn’t come on the LiveCD for space reasons.

You could just boot up OpenSolaris, turn on the network and add the appropriate packages. This could take a little bit of time, if you are not patient, and who wants to wait for downloads just to kick the tires?

Here’s where you get to the genius of the Bonus disk. The virtual image has all of this software pre-installed, so you don’t have to wait for all of the packages to download and install themselves.

I tried this out on my new Intel Centrino2 processor-based laptop. The LiveCD came up like a dream (with even the audio working out of the box). The VirtualBox image installed without a hitch and gave me the glories of a more complete stack, preinstalled into the image. (Actually, I downloaded the most recent version of VirtualBox, rather than using the one on the DVD.) You can see some screen shots of this operation over at this guy’s blog.

And best of all, these bits include a bunch of the optimizations we have added for Intel processor-based systems!

ETA: If you are looking to get your hands on this student pack for yourself, I would recommend getting connected to the Campus Ambassador's Project in OpenSolaris.

Categories: Academic, Open Source

Comments (2)

November 4, 2008 3:33 AM PST Michal Pryc

David, Nice post, one little thing, the "this guy’s blog." is not working properly. best Michal

November 5, 2008 11:21 AM PST David Stewart (Intel) Total Points: 9,435 Status Points: 9,435 Black Belt

Thanks, @Michal. I fixed the link, and also edited how to ask for the student pack. You need to approach one of the Campus Ambassadors apparently.

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