Glenn <eponymousalias@yahoo.com> writes in comp.unix.solaris:
|* xterm takes 16 seconds to start up. This is completely repeatable,
| but also completely absurd on a 3GHz machine.

If you don't need input methods, you can make it faster, see:
http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/sho...cgi?id=1459#c8
for the line to add to .Xdefaults to disable them.

|* I cannot find any simple means to swap the Caps Lock and Control
| keys. Under Linux, gnome-keyboard-properties has a Layout tab that
| lets me trivially set this in place. That tab is missing in the
| OpenSolaris version.

You can also do this with xmodmap, as has been done on Unix for over
20 years - instructions should be findable on google or in the xmodmap
man page.

|* The Live CD obviously stores less content than the previous SXDE DVD
| release. But none of the release-notes stuff that is immediately at
| hand after the install seems to suggest a standard Sun-supported IPS
| repository from which to download all the equivalent packages. For
| that matter, there's no obvious tool to even list what IPS packages
| are on the machine and which ones are available but missing.

The IPS repository is set up by default - you can use either the "pkg"
command line or the GUI under "System" -> "Administration" -> "Package
Manager" to pick many more to install from there. (The categorization
is a bit broken, so many are not in the categories in the GUI - for
instance, both Sun Studio & gcc compilers are available, but not listed
under Developer Tools.)

For more details on this, see the IPS section of the Getting Started
with 2008.05 manual and the IPS docs at:
http://www.opensolaris.com/learn/index.html

--
Alan Coopersmith * alanc@alum.calberkeley.org * Alan.Coopersmith@Sun.COM
http://blogs.sun.com/alanc/ * http://people.freedesktop.org/~alanc/
http://del.icio.us/alanc/ * http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~alanc/
Working for, but definitely not speaking for, Sun Microsystems, Inc.