Virtualization – UNIX Administratosphere

If you are interested in the UNIX desktop and prefer KDE as I do, KDE4Daily may be just the thing for you. KDE4Daily is a QEMU virtual machine image built from the daily build of the most current development in KDE (currently at KDE 4.1).

This is what is often called “the bleeding edge” (an expansion of “the cutting edge”) – that is, the only guarantee is that there is no guarantee. The KDE build comes with a built-in bug reporting tool that activates when some part of KDE crashes.

There is an excellent (visual) review of KDE4Daily at /home/liquidat.

KDE4Daily is a neat way to get and use the latest KDE build in a relatively low hazard way. I plan to see how it runs for me – somewhere.

OpenSolaris 2008.05 (for x86) was released earlier this month, along with a new OpenSolaris web site (which to me bears more than a passing resemblence to the OpenSUSE web site). I don’t know the difference between that web site and OpenSolaris.org, but somebody must think its worth it.

I’ve already ordered my CD of OpenSolaris 2008.05; now to find something to run it on. Alright already, so that’s backwards – but I’m always trying the new UNIX versions. And why not? This is an excellent way to find out what is likely to be in Solaris 11.

The CD of OpenSolaris 2008.05 is also a live CD, which means you can try it out anywhere the operating system can run: just reboot with the CDROM in the drive.

Jason Perlow of ZDNet wrote a nice review article titled OpenSolaris: What Ubuntu wants to be when it grows up on May 5, 2008. It isn’t a step by step technical review, but it is good nonetheless. Another review was recently written by Ashwin Bhat K S about his experiences with OpenSolaris 2008.05. He used a laptop, so this review is doubly interesting. There is another review by Milind Arun Choudhary which talks about installing OpenSolaris (Nexenta, actually) into a VirtualBox virtual machine under MacOS X.

I can only hope that OpenSolaris driver support will improve; last time I installed it onto a current laptop it had no wifi connectivity and no network connectivity because of missing drivers. Is it any surprise then that Ashwin’s first recommendation is more network drivers and more wifi drivers?

Update: Another person has done up a nice article about installing OpenSolaris 2008.05 – their first and only post apparently!