Brian Nitz wrote: > The shell choice, memory issue, and even the naming issue all come down > to how many hats the Indiana project is supposed to wear. >
Indeed, and at the moment those of us actually doing the work are targeting fewer hats than many would like, because we have to focus in order to get an 80% (say) solution ready in a fairly targeted time. > If Indiana going to be a one stop shop for opensolaris binary > distributions, then it had better find a solution to the default script > issue so it won't break thousands of scripts of users migrating from > Solaris 10. If it is going to try to replace linux in all of the places > Ubuntu and other Linux distributions are currently used including > embedded applications, old Windows PCs and small laptops for those of us > who don't buy a new one every 2 years, then it needs to recognize that > 512MB is still a high minimum memory footprint. > I think others have indicated earlier in the thread that we well understand that is necessary to reduce the memory requirements. Belenix, for example, got a much lower footprint by using a very fragile means of constructing its boot archive; it's prone to breakage any time a new feature is added to the kernel. We chose to go with a somewhat more (though not perfectly) maintainable approach for the preview, and will be working in concert with IPS to develop the mechanisms necessary to have a release which can be both minimal and maintainable. But when push comes to shove, I'm going to opt for maintainable every time. Putting out releases on the schedule we're striving for here (and with the desired rate of change in its components) demands that. > But if Indiana is going to be targeted towards a specific type of > hacker/developer who already has a high-end PC with loads of memory, > then we can ignore these issues and might as well not limit ourselves to > what will fit on a 650MB CD because DVD's are just as cheap these days > and I can't think of any PC with more than 512MB that doesn't also have > DVD capability. The use of a liveCD instead of a liveDVD seems to be a > throwback to Ubuntu which _does_ work on a 256MB laptop. Why limit > yourself in the media dimension while assuming everyone has lots of RAM? > This misunderstands the purpose of the live CD, as the size of the media and the RAM requirements are only loosely related. The point of the CD is to provide a reasonably low-cost entry to trying out a representative OpenSolaris desktop, not be a delivery mechanism for everything one might conceivably want. At fairly standard broadband speeds the CD should be an hour or so to download. A DVD-sized media is obviously much longer, and still likely wouldn't hold everything we might want to throw into it. We can, and will, produce other media options besides the CD, but that's the problem it solves. Dave _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
