> I think an OmniOS Survival guide would be great.

Theo, I think that would be a really good idea. In my opinion some pages of the 
current wiki admin guide are already a very good first start (e.g. networking 
and zones). What’s missing in my point of view are „Migration Guides“ from 
other operating systems, especially linux and freebsd. Those migration guides 
should cover all things that look „strange“ for non-solaris folks e.g. 
partitioning, they should elaborate how to best use the „specialities“ e.g. how 
to use smf, fmd ..., what are the benefits of crossbow, what’s that automounter 
thing? Why is my home not in /home?

Those are the questions I often get from people not familiar with 
Illumos/Solaris. I already startet a couple of notes that would cover some of 
those questions. Helping newbies or linux-sysadmins to get started with omnios. 
So I would really like to contribute if there would be a real community site.

> If you have to put something like "newbies" in quotes and talk about them as 
> different than us, you are viewing this community in an unhealthy way.  
> OmniOS is designed to take Illumos and all of its features and package it in 
> a way that makes a minimal and useful general operating system targeted at 
> servers and appliances.  Anyone with whom that vision aligns is most welcome 
> in the community and we should encourage efforts to make them feel as an 
> accepted part of the whole.

I think the OmniOS community might be small but I would never call it unhealthy 
and I must confess I like the familiar atmosphere.

One thing why I prefer OmniOS about any other os/distro out there is its focus 
on minimalism. This is something that totally contradicts with easy 
accessibility for newbies. However, we as a community could do a better job to 
pave the way for the more experienced linux/bsd sysadm who wants to dig into 
OmniOS. This might be to provide a comprehensive guide how to run typical 
software stacks. This should include how to build from the source, how to 
package those things and how to run it (smf). 

Although I provide a public OmniOS package server myself. I would never 
recommend to use omnios just with 3rd party repositories. I think the provided 
build scripts are a wealthy source of information to build own packages or to 
do a quick proof of concept but they should for sure not be viewed as the 
„Missing OmniOS Distribution Packages“. Those packages might be highly 
customized for someone else very own specific needs.

What I’m getting at, it’s for sure that it would be nice to be more attractive 
for a broader user base, but all efforts should be in the spirit of the 
existing OmniOS. Hey, that’s why the existing user base is here in the first 
place. So let’s educate people on how to use OmniOS to unleash it’s full 
potential and don’t try to just provide them with easy to use pre-packaged 
solutions! 

Let me close with a pointer to the scala community. They had a similar problem 
for a long time, and since they come up with http://docs.scala-lang.org the 
documentation is constantly improving. I really like this approach of a 
comprehensive website, containing in-depth guides, easy how-tos for primers and 
handy cheat-cheats for the daily use. I’m ready to contribute to a great 
community doc and willing to invest time to build it if others also jump in!

Cheers, Steffen

—
Dr. Steffen Kram                   Ulm University
[email protected]            Institute for Applied
www.mathematik.uni-ulm.de/iai      Information Processing

Helmholtzstraße 18                 Phone: 0731 50-23575
89081 Ulm, Germany                 Twitter: @stefritz

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