Frustrations with OpenSolaris

I'm honestly frustrated with OpenSolaris right now.  I love the operating system.  I've been running it on my laptop since I bought it a year and a half ago.  Windows ran on it for less than a day, and then I wiped it and loaded OpenSolaris on it.

It was a choice between OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, and Ubuntu.  I had been reading a lot about OpenSolaris, and it sounded interesting.  I decided on OpenSolaris because I was, and still am, doing Java programming.  It's what I bought the laptop for.

I've been frustrated since I loaded it that the wireless network card doesn't work, the built in camera doesn't work, and the audio drive is really terrible (if I change the volume, I lose the left channel).  I just recently got mp3's to work, and still have to use mplayer for other media.  I've never been able to run the latest version of Gnucash on it (I run it in vbox on a Ubuntu image).  Now, I've not been able to update the os for a couple of months now because of a kernal panic (or some such) when booting.  I was waiting on the latest update, because it was apparently fixed, at least on other systems.  I posted a message on the help forum, but I need to put the kernel into debug mode during booting to find out why it's forcing a reboot during the boot cycle.

Ok, may be I need to move on.  If the contract I'm working on does not have anything for me this weekend, I may spend the weekend moving to either Ubuntu or PC-BSD.  Or may be I'll split the drive and dual-boot between the too.

The main thing that is stopping me is Windows.  That's very frustrating for me.  I run Windows under VirtualBox and use it because I'm currently working on a project, in Java, that has to be run under Windows (it uses a native engine for it's core function).  I worry that the vbox images will not work under Ubuntu or BSD.  I suppose I can recreate everything, but that could take the entire weekend by itself.

If I don't have the time, I hope the next version of OpenSolaris fixes this issue, but I still would like to get the wireless networking and other issues working.  Especially since the whole family is now using it.

I won't walk away from OpenSolaris completely.  It is still my intention on building a computer from the components and it will be geared towards OpenSolaris.  Primarily because of ZFS, but also on how well it runs VirtualBox.  I want something I can run multiple operating systems on, for different functions.  But for now, I don't think it's perfect for the computer I'm currently using.