Okay, now that I've booted from my oSol live CD at least 15~20 times, I think I can say a few words about it.
- Its a breeze for newbies (like me) to get going with this OS. You have an ISO image of the live CD which you just need to Download > Burn > Insert. The OS loads pretty quickly and requires no login in this mode.
- It auto-detects and auto-configures your network (at least did that for my cable internet with static IP). It enables the LAN interface when your router/modem stabilises after powering on, and disables the interface when you power it off, or disconnect. Of course, it gives appropriate alerts after taking such actions. You can also turn this feature off, if you want manual control over the network connections.
- Like Bjourn (see comment on previous post) said, its a very well-documented OS (what else can you expect from Sun! ), and that helps learners a lot. I found it extremely useful to have a link to the 'guide' located on the desktop, and the entire guide being there on the CD. Sometimes, you cannot / do not want to connect to the internet, and it helps a lot having some offline material to get started with.
Now, here are some shortcomings:
- A big bug that exists in oSol 2008.05 is regarding the Screen Resolution setting. The system boots with a default setting of 800x600 px. If you try to change it to 1024x768, the screen goes irrecoverably blank, even though it is not turned off. And one is forced to shut down the system (using the 'soft' power switch; no need to soft-boot using the restart button; the system is still very much alive, even if one can't see anything..) and then start all over again. However, you can prevent this thing from happening by checking the "always use....." option in the same dialogue box. Strange !!
- There's no OpenOffice :( Now, I know I'd be asking too much from Sun to providea copy of OO within the 700 MB live CD. Yet, I haven't been able to find a way to get a copy of OO working on oSol
- Creating a user directory on a pen-drive doesn't seem to work in the live mode, at least. Will have to retry after making a disk installation
