Back in the nineties when I trained as an apprentice coder at the University of Umeå, I was first exposed to the Dark Side. It was very seductive with an intuitive TCP/IP stack, simple signal management conventions, concise UI:s, lean config files, powerful scripts, nifty daemons and of course the Bible: Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment by W. Richard Stevens. I marveled at the distributed GUI, broken and deeply insecure though as it was, I admired that multi-user security concerns had been addressed back in the ‘70s already, not as an afterthought in 1989. Then I was brought out in the real world and began appreciating GUI conventions,  speed of implementation, solving customer problems and so on and came and joined the Just and Fair in the Microsoft camp and haven’t strayed since. Much.

But

But now and then the urge to complicate things gets stronger and stronger and with members of my immediate family having been lost to the Others for years now, the lure became overwhelming. After years of propaganda from my father I finally decided to install OpenSolaris on a virtual machine. Of course Solaris will not install on Windows Virtual PC Beta. It does not recognize any of the virtual SATA devices and thus cannot install. What to do? Well I gave up of course.

For a week or two until I thought I should make a serious attempt and actually dowloaded Sun’s VirtualBox.

VirtualBox vs Windows Virtual PC Beta

I really wanted to hate it, it not being made by the Just and Fair folks at Redmond. However, it is difficult to argue with 64 bit CPU high performance virtualization with USB, disk and network integration. It sucks the life out of the host machine, but in return both guest and host perform acceptably, lest you allocate too much memory to the guest “computer”, unlike with Windows Virtual PC where you get low performance (but better than Virtual PC 2007) on the handful of platforms it does handle.

Of course, I popped in the ISO in an empty Virtual machine (ironically using the same empty VHD Windows Virtual PC Beta created but couldn’t make available to Solaris) and of course the setup just chugged along event free. A vast improvement over previous UNIXes I installed back in the day. It refused to give me any options but to fill my VHD with the One Solaris partition to bind them all. None of that allocating partitions to /root, /home, /usr/local et c-business that used to be 90% of the fun of trying to set up a Unix style system.

Stereo? Not for me

Of course, once everything is set up you want to do stuff. Back in the day I would have set up FTP and the Apache httpd and created logins for friends and acquaintances and set up the firewall to allow for SSH:ing in to my computer. My computer in this case just being nothing but a figment of my laptop’s imagination, that would be even more pointless than it was back in the day. So: What to do? Weill, of course: Develop in .NET! After all, if I am to achieve global supremacy, I need to be able to code on Solaris as well, at some point.

This is where it all came back to me. Because it is a proper UNIX and not some humble Linux, allegedly, they haven’t gotten mono to run consistently on Solaris. The hours of gunzipping and ./configuring and make believing. compile errors upon compile errors. Downloaded various other package managers to appease the evildoers. Nothing I did could make mono build, despite gigabytes of source code. Ah well… Now I gave up properly.

OpenSUSE

Until I tried OpenSUSE, that is. Similar scenario, clean VM in VirtualBox, popped a physical DVD in my drive and shared it to VirtualBox, the empty VM booted and started the Open SUSE setup. I got to fiddle with my partitions (yay!) but I chose not to. Again, nothing fun happened during install, it just worked. A couple of reboots later I was able to login on my new machine, open the package installer, select everything mono-related and click install. After 20 minutes or se everything was downloaded and installed, and I just went to the Start menu(or what do you guys call it? The non-Start menu?) –> Applications-Development-Integrated Development Environment (monodevelop) and start to code. Very painless. Press play, off you go and you have ASP.NET being hosted on a Linux machine.

Then I noticed that my window was a bit on the smallish side, I would have preferred a higher resolution, like the one I had on the Solaris VM or so, so I go into the yast2 thingy and change display settings to something I consider appropriate and save the settings. I am instructed to restart the window manager, so I reboot the computer (yes I know. but it involved less interaction) and login again. Everything looks fine until after 5 seconds when the display gets garbled and I’m thrown out back to the login screen. I try all kinds of failsafe settings but to no avail. Of course I could manually edit a conf file somewhere to solve the issue, but Google has yet to reaffirm its friendship with me by coming up with a link to a Q&A forum where the question has been answered,

So?

Back to the good side it is, where stuff just works. Of course you can also end up in situations where stuff just doesn’t work as well (oi! CRM4! There’s this new thing, Windows Server 2008. It’s been out for a good two years now!), but resources are more plentiful and as an added bonus: you feel better cursing big successful company than makers of free software.