UNIX admin <[email protected]> writes: >> I'm using what would pass as junk hardware to many here. Its older >> hardware and cheapo cards... but I've had to use PCI sata cards >> because OSOL does not recognize my onboard sata controller. > > Believe me when I write that I completely understand your frustration, > simply because it is my frustration also. > > This has been a weakness of Sun's engineering for a very, very long > time, as long as I've known Solaris (1994).
[Alert1 Alert1, longwinded ramble ahead] I was kind of taken by your comments on this. I'd had it in my mind that some things about the free Solaris haven't changed since my first episodes way back about the time you noted. Mid 90's My usage was as an absolute newbie all around, not just to Solaris but to computing at all. On my 50th birthday (1995) was my first encounter with a computer I owned. Up till then what I knew about computers was that the lady at the unemployment office used one to look at my work records. (I'm a life long and now retired construction worker [Welder and High rigger as field construction boilermaker], High school drop out and general illiterate rolling stone, so had frequent experience in unemployment offices around the mid west and in California) My new wife who also worked in offices of UCSB wanted to get `online' so I bought her a computer, and myself one soon after. Back then, talk of the `information highway' was very appealing. Not many lay people had computers at home yet. Those first machines were windows 95 which was pretty new then. I still remember that it took me about a week to learn to control the mouse. A friend of my new wife, was the `network system admin' guy for UCSB (University of California at Santa Barbara). I had landed on a construction job 20 miles north on a Refinery project for Exxon in 1992 and ended up living there until 2002 or so. That friends son (a young teenager and I struck up a friendship which lasted into his adulthood) was a linux fan (a slack rat). Who soon wooed me into the everlasting tinkering a linux person did back then. So I never really did learn much about windows until much later. That tinkering lead me to tryout a free OS being offered by Solaris. As I recall it cost something like $40 to try it out. The OS was free but you paid for the processed CDs. I still remember when I finally got it to boot up that I thought it was really cool to see the Sun logo pop up on my home machine. The console seemed really retarded even then, compared to the console interface on linux. No mouse, no copy paste from terminal to vi or the like. I tinkered with that OS for several months before kind of giving up on it and trying to learn more about linux. I see today in build 110 that the console is still about the same. Absolutely retarded now, compared to what linux offers. All kinds of unexpected behaviour with backspace delete and such. Still no mouse or copy paste to an editor. Seemed to me that the console would have been vastly improved in some 14 yrs. Especially since it seems there are large numbers of Solaris eggheads that are command line oriented people. I don't mean that as a serious gripe since the gui is easily attainable and Xterms offer a sophisticated command line environment. Its just surprising somehow that the console has gone basically ignored. When, unlike in 1995, lots of linux (gnu) tools are common place on the Osol OS now. Back then it was a big chore for an illiterate to even get gnu tools working on osol. To tie up this ramble: To me the big attraction back to Osol came with a fellow on a linux (gentoo) list responding to a post of mine about building up a home NAS, suggested I look into zfs, and osol as a solution and I've been checking it out for a month or two now. Zfs is truly an amazing tool, but the whole Osol package is a bit daunting for a self taught (with massive wholes in knowledge) tinkerer. I'm still a good ways from having created a low maintenance, solid and dependable NAS with osol.11. Something I can just setup and use for backups of the other 6 machines on my home lan. The Cifs server has yet to produce a visible host on the windows `Network Places' dialog. That's not a show stopper but some of the windows based tools I've experimented with using to backup those OSs, want to be able to navigate to the remote share in limited dialog boxes where typing in an UNC address is not an option. The shares are accessible and writable from windows but only if I type in the UNC address into the location box on `windows explorer' file management tool. (or similar tools) Whereas all other Windows shares, and linux shares, simply appear in the `windows explorer' file manager under the network icon. But compared to the two consumer grade NASs available for purchase, that I've tried, osol/zfs seems vastly superior in too many ways to ignore... even with the vast amount of troubles (AND help) I've encountered. ( well documented in my heavy use of these osol lists). _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
