I am not sure I am proposing a new community, or just expressing myself with a problem that has existed and will continue to get worse, in the way opensource software is incorporated on OpenSolaris distributions.
This could be a long message, if it annoys you to read lengthly messages, please feel free to set yourself free and hit the "next" button in your browser.;-) I was in a situation where a laptop being used for a presentation at OSCON, a Ferrari 3400 in this case, couldn't operate the projector. Unfortunate as it is, some of the packages are not yet put back to OpenSolaris yet, and are currently going through an internal test cycle (so to speak;-) until they can get putback. I was able to get my MacBook running Solaris plugged in at the conference center and punchin to the SWAN to grab the bundle of packages from his server in Holland, cp'd to a USB device, and over to the Ferrari. The fact that I didn't have any Mac OSX VPN software (or any other softwar that is not included with Mac OSX), but had placed my x86 info and latest software to the Solaris side after getting it installed recentely is a happy story in itself. The Mac running Solaris build 44 rocked! But this is for another story...;-) I thought I was out of the woods, but soon realized that our internal software at Sun which does provide support for the Ferrari (frkit, if any of you may have heard of it) wouldn't install on Belenix, which the Channing Love was wanting to show and use...after all we were at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, it only seemed fitting to me that an Open Source operating system be shown, if possible... But Casper's install wouldn't work as it couldn't find some of the standard tools...and after discovering that, I couldn't unpack the tarball as /usr/sfw/bin/gtar was not there... However, more digging around shows that gtar is in fact in the path, just not located where Sun places this in Solaris (i.e., /usr/sfw/bin). A which showed it was somewhere in /usr/foss/bin or /opt/foss/bin, one or the other, I don't have a running Belenix at hand. In this case, as simple symlink from /usr/sfw to /opt/foss might be sufficient, not sure. Fast forward a couple days, and I'm talking with a friend about Nexenta, and he says, "they've done what you were saying a few years back, that if the Solaris kernel could be grafted together with GNU tools, it could present the best of both worlds. However, Nexenta is not without faults I don't think, but I have not looked at the latest version, I'm in the process of doing that and was playing with the live cd last night (ellate ?). This probablem will continue to plague the OpenSolaris community, it's no different with Blastwave, pkgsrc, sunfreeware, or even Stefan's /opt/fw4sun packages. This is not to point the finger at anyone though. This is merely to say I think we need to have some type of standards base, one that can try to align these different distributions with Solaris in a way that will make their OpenSolaris distribution complimentary to Solaris and allow the users of both systems to co-exist easier together, if that makes sense. The happy ending was that I didn't give up, and right up to the wire, I was finally able to get the Belenix system up and going on the projector with only seconds to spare...literally 10 - 15 seconds, if not 30! My MacBook Pro rocks, and it rocks on the metal! I might not have native wifi, but much thanks to JanS, ShoudongZ, DanaM, and anyone else that helped get code back into Solaris so that it *WILL* run on the metal! Without that support, I'd have never got on the SWAN to get frkit to begin with!<wink> -- Alan DuBoff - Sun Microsystems Solaris x86 Engineering - IHV/OEM Group _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
