Richard Elling wrote: > James Cornell wrote: >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> >>>> PS: My experience is with SXCE (Solaris Express Community Edition) not >>>> Indiana on this hardware, and I find Indiana to be lacking in >>>> extensibility which this type of setup would most likely depend on. >>>> >>> Could you provide more details on this lack of extensibility? >>> Certainly support for servers is more difficult today with Indiana >>> given the current lack of Jumpstart or something similar (but see >>> http://opensolaris.org/os/project/caiman/auto_install/ for information >>> on what's coming). What do you find about SXCE that makes it better >>> for laptops like the MacBook? >>> >>> dsc >>> >> UFS root is better than ZFS root with the current situation. > > SXCE offers ZFS boot and works very nicely with LiveUpgrade. > I see the point about the difference between local media (iso) and > the OpenSolaris repositories... the latter isn't so good for the > bandwidth > challenged. > >> Nevada is >> what Indiana is built upon and from my experience desktop support is >> still better (Fonts and other closed components are still very >> important). > > Actually, SXCE font experiences are all screwed up from b93-on > [due to a variety of issues, notably freetype2 hickups]. b97 is > reasonably > ok, though, AFAICT. > >> Text-mode installer. Offline install and live upgrade >> using isos. Probably others. Specific to the hardware, the ZFS boot >> issue is the main concern with dual-boot. >> > > I'm not sure what concern you have on dual-boot, I do this often. > Perhaps you can enlighten us? Perhaps it is something which has > already been fixed... > -- richard > I notice the font issue after B90 or so. GUI may have potential issues on this type of hardware due to the driver version but that all depends on the build of Nevada, Indiana vs OpenSolaris and ATI vs NVIDIA. From my experience less-so, but I'll throw it out there. The main concern is ZFS root simply is not an option due to EFI bugs in the Solaris installer. Though the workaround still works (Still risky to a multiboot setup) ZFS root is self-contained and requires direct booting of the kernel by unpacking the boot archive using GRUB, while the current solution is to use rEFIt to chainload preferrably off of a superblock, and this it potentially problematic.
The concerns stem from Solaris installer bugs that have been fixed in part, but for the user have not all been fixed, so it's still not really good coming from the user experience side. Having to change the EFI system partition because of presumptions that the partitioner and fdisk makes is really a problem, it leads to many extra hours of problems if something goes wrong. GRUB's installation onto the MBR by default without an option to not do so results in an unbootable Solaris system. (EFI will deny this and since there's no superblock install you cannot chainload with a default install) Though not specific to Indiana, GRUB being retarded and making assumptions, the fdisk and format bugs, oddities when trying to use USB disks with OpenSolaris (Takes a good 15 minutes to boot on Sun's own hardware, and I don't think this is an option with rEFIt even, so non-Mac Pro users are SOL in going the USB route) Specific to Indiana, the lack of text-mode is annoying (Actually it's a keymap problem that I'm trying to speak about now that I think about it) Jumpstart another, as for some merely trying to the boot the media on systems without the latest firmware have some issues, leaving no alternatives except direct, native installs, but again I've tried B93 and it's still borked. Issues for both are format, GRUB, fdisk, X11 keymaps and console keymaps. Anyways, until SXCE has good fonts back and is at B100 or so I'm not going to even attempt it again on either my MacBook Pro or Ultra 20, and Indiana not until 2008.11 because from my experience it's lacking in the software department still, ips bugs waste tons of bandwidth (More than simply grabbing SXCE at times if you follow mailing list threads) and retarded assumptions in general about what hardware the user is trying to install on. Both IMHO are equally crap on this hardware. No bluetooth still, fonts look like crap, power management is utterly pathethic, and the reality that Sun pushed Indiana wholeheartedly knowing that it was only intended for developers, but that didn't stop their mud mongers from telling regular users "It's fantastic, it's new, it just works, try it we'll give you FREE gold bars!" James _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
