Gueven Bay wrote:
So, the presentation was held.
All the people there learned what Project Indiana is.
Can someone write in some short sentences what Mr. Murdock told you,please?
From my standpoint as an audience member, here's what I think he
told us (and I didn't take notes, so have summarized and paraphrased
and possibly completely mangled/misunderstood, so hopefully Glynn or
Ian will correct the bits I get wrong):
Project Indiana's goal is to provide a simple answer to these
frequent newbie questions:
- How do I download and install OpenSolaris?
- How do I upgrade OpenSolaris without downloading another 3 gb
every two weeks?
- How do I easily fetch and manage the addon packages I want?
- Once I start using it, if I need support, what do I do?
The core draft of their idea, which they plan to refine with community
input is a reference distro of OpenSolaris, so that you can download
and install it without having to have a half hour explanation of
"OpenSolaris is the code base - the distros are SX, Nexenta, Belenix,
Martux, etc." The base distro would be a single CD with the core
OS - kernel, drivers, basic window system, and package manager, with
which you can then download the components you want for your system
from the the online repository.
They don't want to re-invent unnecessary wheels, so are looking at
what's available to fill in the parts of this that are needed.
They also don't want to fall into the "Fedora dilemma", where the faster
moving open distro is where every starts with for their personal machines,
small side projects, and new startups, and then find out they've managed
to make a critical service on it, but then can't get support since it's
not the enterprise version - do you then "upgrade" to the enterprise
version, which probably means downgrading to older versions of many of
the software packages?
The "better Linux than Linux" tagline was a mistake, since they were
trying to capture "a better implementation of what the CIO's & analysts
think Linux is than the actual Linux distros" in a short pithy statement
that it turns out everyone misunderstood. (And even after repeatedly
explaining "I know Linux is just the kernel, but people say 'Linux'
to mean the entire open source OS/distro experience, and that's what
we're aiming at", people still kept interrupting "But that's not Linux,
Linux is just a kernel", as if the founder of one of the oldest Linux
distros and leader of the Linux Standards Base project didn't know that
and hadn't just explained that.)
And while the online discussion has had a lot of heat on breaking
compatibility, the binary compatibility and lack of many different
incompatible distros is what Ian sees as one of Solaris's big strengths
from his time spent trying to deal with Linux ISV's in the LSB.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
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