Sun is not known to be a great developer of GUI applications. The best example is probably the unlikely suite of administration tools offered to Solaris sysadmins along the years. Now that “admintool” is a thing of the past (as of Solaris 10) and considering that the Solaris Management Console is not significantly better, we are left with this sad conclusion : managing Solaris with a GUI is a pain –> managing Solaris is impossible if you are not a sysadmin.
The good news is that a new OpenSolaris project has been created to make Solaris configuration by end-users easier : it is called Project Visual Panels and looks promising.
Since the underlying storage is provided by the SMF data store, it looks like the graphical Solaris “registry” is on its way. Let’s see if Solaris can do it better than Windows…
Go to the project page
Go to the preliminary screeshots of the GUI
T:
OpenSolaris,
SMF