So it turns out I was a little hasty in my judgement that OpenSolaris 2008.05 was a “Full Stop.” It turns out that it’s actually quite easy to get it running, it just requires a couple of modifications, of which are not particularly difficult or intrusive.

So, I have OpenSolaris 2008.05 running with ZFS (file system that ensures your data is what you think it is..can detect and CORRECT hardware issues like if you have a bad powersupply messing with bits…), iSCSI (think a Hard Disk over a network connection) volume for Time Machine on my Mac Leopard desktop, and Sun Ray software for mom.

It turns out that using Solaris Express fixed my issue with the Sun Ray, but broke iSCSI, which was totally not acceptable. So that forced me to play with OpenSolaris again at work, and I got Sun Ray working in 20 minutes or so. I was just tired and impatient here at home.

All I have to do now is go through all my files on the server, clean everything up, make it available to me on my desktop, and then I’m done.

The MythTV machine is working, but I need to store the videos on the network eventually as well, because the amount of data will eventually fill it up pretty fast…But it’s ok for now, I only have 2 episodes of Hereos on it. The rest I watched online, sadly, not in HD. HD is only available for Windows. Yuck.

With regard to where else can I use OpenSolaris…well, not on my laptop, because my phone nor USB modem for Sprint work in OpenSolaris. However, I may set it up for a server at work. We will see.