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My favorite OpenSolaris 2008.11 features

By David Stewart (Intel) (138 posts) on December 7, 2008 at 9:56 pm

The next OpenSolaris binary release is due to launch any time now. It's turning into a pretty slick and sexy desktop release. Here are some of my favorite features:

As I previously wrote here, I am trying out one of the latest builds on my Intel Centrino 2 processor based laptop, a Sony VAIO VGN-Z540. ie, the latest and greatest.

One of the coolest of course is PowerTOP, which has been updated to v1.1 in this release of OpenSolaris. This is a fantastic tool that helps you see how efficient your power management is, which pieces of software may be the culprits in sucking your battery and where to focus improvements. (And, was originally developed by Intel!)

Speaking of power, there is a really cool power history tool which shows power events and will show you the efficiency of your battery charging. It's accessible by clicking the power icon at the bottom of the desktop.

Since this is the latest Intel-based laptop, I was extremely happy to see the new connection manager. Clicking on the network icon on the bottom of the desktop results in the available access points being displayed (this was captured in my home office, lots of neighbors with wireless!). If you connect a live ethernet wire, the wireless automatically turns off and vice versa. Very cool!

The disk usage command comes along with Gnome, of course, so it's not unique to OpenSolaris. But this is a great way to find out where your space has leaked to. Here I imported some music files so they are taking up the most space.

I was also surprised to see the built-in web cam on my laptop works great. This is from the Ekiga video conferencing tool built in.

What about fun stuff? Well, the audio worked great on this laptop, so did Songbird v0.7. Excellent to have this available, and plugins like lyricmaster work fine too.

Suspend / Resume didn't work when I enabled it, unfortunately, a fact that I have reported back to defects.opensolaris.org. But this is really a fantastic release with lots of sexy new features - check it out at opensolaris.com.

Categories: Mobility, Open Source

Comments (1)

December 10, 2008 11:14 PM PST Dale Taylor (Intel) Total Points: 8,824 Status Points: 8,324 Brown Belt

Thanks for this great peek inside, I'm going to have to try it out. Does it install well on a desktop system too? How about one that's a year or two older?

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