[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >and some other minor stuff. It is most unlikely that you did never have
> >a look at SchilliX and we all know, that knowing that/how something works
> >makes things a lot easier for people who do it the second time and are
> >not forced to develop everything from scratch as I did.
>
> True. But these are just the ideas that you also get by by looking at any
> of the Linux LiveCDs from a high level. Translating from these ideas into
> a working self-hosting distro is the real challenge:
>From a short look at Belenix, it seems that SchilliX is much closer to a self
hosting enviroment than Belenix.
Everythig provided by SchilliX-0.1 (except the Sun OpenSolaris sources itself)
has been compiled on SchilliX-0.1 and even Xorg compiles on SchilliX-0.2.
The binaries found on Belenix have been compiled on Solaris 10 instead.
> * Just looking at a disro does not tell you how the Solaris New Boot works.
> One needs to understand this in order to create an OpenSolaris distro.
> How does one figure out the key to getting a rootfs on the ramdisk
> without knowing Newboot - the fact that ?bootpath? should be absent.
The related facts have been discussed with a lot of details on the opensolaris
mailing list and it was absolutely no problem for me to set up the boot
environment for SchilliX.
> * How do you find out the cd device node that contains the LiveCD early
> in the boot when devfsadm has not yet executed ? It took me two
> iterations to arrive at an optimal solution. First solution was
> suboptimal
> till I wrote a small utility using libdevinfo to list the cd nodes and
> then use fstyp on them to get the volume id.
SchilliX provides code to 'search' for the right CD, why didn't you ask?
> * How do you handle the Math library requirements ? I ported and enhanced
> the FreeBSD math libary which was more than a week's effort for me.
> SchilliX did not make the Math library sources available.
Having a short look at the (probable) current state of your port of libm
shows that you seem to be at approx. the same state as I have been after
the first week. The libm you find on SchilliX-0.2 got one month's effort from
me. Why did you start your unneeded enterprize?
> * What files do you include in the miniroot ? Optimise space.
It is simple to find out whatyou need for a minimal version, it should not take
more than 3 iterations.
> * What are the correct options to pass to mkisofs to get the desired
> bootable
> cd ?
As the needed options are documented in detail in the mkisofs man page and the
included README's and as even the GRUB documentation includes a chapter on
mkisofs it should not take more than 30 minutes to find this out.
> * How do you handle the inetd failures ? Inetd has a dependency on ksh and
> it took me several days of hacking to identify that the same
> functionality
> exists in /usr/xpg4/bin/sh
As I did write many mails on this problem in this mailing list in August, it
was easier for you than for me. You had the advantage of not being on vacation
after I did the introducing work on the bug. After I did recover from the 4600
mails in my mailbox after I did return from vacation, it took me 2 days to find
the problem - you did not send any information on it meanwhile :-(
> * I had to write the missing sysidtool service manifests and renamed them
> to
> sysonfigure.
I did the same in May, so you have not been forced to do this.
> * I had to preconfigure additional open-source drivers like network drivers
> from Masayuki. Which files should you change to add the drivers by hand ?
See SchilliX ;-) SchilliX-0.1 includes all drivers except the one that has been
created by Masayuki _after_ I found that SchilliX-0.1 did not work on some
emulators and asked him for help.
> * One can easily configure dhcp on a interface but it is quite involved to
> write a proper /etc/dhcp/eventhook script that auto-configures DNS and
> NIS
> based on whichever is available.
Schillix does not yet support this due to lack of time. SchilliX uses a statix
intermediate solution that works too.
> * I have actually picked ideas from KnoppiX like:
> - Giving user option to select the keyboard layout and subsequently
> using it for setting XKBLayout in Xorg as well.
As the Sun keyboard layout setup is broken, you only have two opportunities:
- fix the Sun keyboard setup bugs (as I did)
- or implement this select service.
> - Scanning all block devices and mounting any supported filesystems -
> recovery feature
I am not sure if this is a good idea in special as Belenix does this without
asking.
I prefer to a boot method that does not touch the hard disk at all.
> - Using physical swap if a Solaris partition is present on the harddisk
> How to identify the swap slice ?
See above. I don't like this being done without asking me.
> * Knowing the boot sequence in SMF using Dan Price and Eric Schrock's
> bootchart.
> * Fixing shutdown issues
> * Configuring many things in /etc to get a clean boot
When I did create SchilliX, there was no such dicumentation.
> * Vold throws out the cdrom occasionally so I had to disable the cdrom
> module in vold.
So you did not really fix the inetd problem.
SchilliX-0.1 & SchilliX-0.2 both have no problem with vold and vold mounts the
CD-ROM a second time if the "small" boot alternative has been selected.
> * Which files do you need to modify in OpenSolaris source to get the
> BeleniX
> name instead of "Solaris" ?
I don't believe that this is important.
uname -a
SunOS s11 5.11 schily24 i86pc i386 i86pc
seems to be sufficient to me. I prefer to apply patches to the kernel to have
less bugs (see patches directory on the ftp server). And as you might have
noticed: these patches have been available since June 17th - the birth day
of SchilliX.
> I had to tackle all these and many more smaller issues too numerous to mention
> here.
You could have asked me - you did decide not to do...
> Obviously I had seen the SchilliX 0.1 in action and got a few ides from there.
> But there is a big difference in getting an idea and it's implementation.
> Building an entire distro from "source code" is a real challenge - I built
> everything in BeleniX from source code. I have written build and package
> metadata generation scripts.
But you did not publish them yet.
> Nothing apart from the SchilliX iso was available when I started. Now that you
> have made the ISO kit available, it will be easy to create SchilliX
> derivatives.
> People can look at your scripts and quickly know how things are done.
Nobody did ask me to get access to my scripts, so nobody (including you) seemed
to be interested in creating an own distribution.
I still see no difference in the objectives of SchilliX and Belenix, maybe you
can enlighten us. If you did not decide to work on a separate distribution,
scattering the effort by replicating tasks that have already been solved, we
could pool our efforts on a single distribution (or at least on two variants
of a base distribution).
As Sun did need two months for the transition from build 17.5 (used with
Schillix-0.1) to Build 18, I spend this time with enhancing libm and cleaning up
the scripts used by the kit.
When Build 18 finally came out, I initially was ready to immediately release
SchilliX-0.2 together with the kit. Unfortunately it turned out that starting
with Build 18, OpenSolaris was not usable because of the inetd problem.
I spend some days to come closer to the problem and asked soem related questions
on the mailing list to no avail. Then I had to start my vacation.......
If the inetd problem did not hit me, the SchilliX kit would have been available
in mid-August. What did you do in this case?
> Having said that it is also pertinent to point out that your challenge was
> greater than mine since you are the pioneer, and started from a clean slate.
> Also as Stephen pointed out in another email, lets end the debate right now.
> This is how open-source works by sharing ideas and code. I came out with a
> distro because I had my own reasons and ideas. I do not think there is
> anything
> wrong with that. It will be great for OpenSolaris in general if all these
> distros become successful and are able to identify their own niches. For
> SchilliX It will definitely be the "Authentic Solaris Experience" :)
I believe that what you did was dissipating efforts and I am still in hope
that there is a chance to change this.
Note that you have a extremely outdated programs in your directory /usr/foss/bin
while I have set up a clean compile environment (using Studio 10) for more
recent tools.
If a UNIX centric OpenSolaris distribution likes to stand against a Linux
centric OpenSolaris distribution, we need to put more effort into quality
ports of important free software.
Jörg
--
EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (uni)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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