Aw man, the contest started on April 11th, but nobody announced it here until April 13th? That gives everybody else a two day head start over me :-(
I think I need to start occasionally hanging out more with all of the Indianites at OpenSolaris.com since I think I'm in the minority of people at opensolaris.org that actually use Indiana as a desktop OS on a daily basis instead of just relying solely on Solaris Express / Solaris 10 like most of the opensolaris.org crowd do. To be honest though, I like both of them (as well as Belenix, Milax, Nexenta, Schillix, Martux). I really think it makes sense to have a Fedora like community test-bed distribution (like Red Hat Fedora) that can be used to try out new features that aren't really stable enough yet to be moved to production ready Solaris Express (the Solaris equivalent of Red Hat Enterprise Linux). The big problems with Indiana 2008.11 so far though are: (1) it doesn't make it easy to do a minimum server install with just a command line and Apache and Tomcat or just Lightttpd or just a command line and a PostFix e-mail server (no GUI!!! yeah you can do svcadm disable gdm, but that's still not a very slim minimal server install for people who come from a background like OpenBSD, FreeBSD or Slackware). I guess there's that distro constructor, but I'm usually in a hurry to do things with the boss telling me I'm on the clock and angry customers calling in and yelling at me, so I haven't really gotten around to researching that yet. The Red Hat Enterprise / CentOS way of doing things where you can just uncheck the boxes for the packages you don't want during installation and then after the install you get an Anaconda kickstart file that you can use to automate the installation of a thousand more identically configured servers seems more intuitive. Yes I know kickstart is a ripoff of Jumpstart in Solaris 10, which brings me to poin t 2: (2) As far as I can tell there's no way of doing automated / scripted installations of 2008.11 like you can with kickstart in Solaris 10. This combined with points #1 and #3 makes it almost impossible for me to use 2008.11 on production servers even though I actually prefer OpenSolaris to Linux. :-( (3) 2008.11 is missing a lot of key components that Solaris Express has that makes a lot of other really great Sun products (such as Sun Secure Global Desktop ) become broken when you try to run them on Indiana. Check out the link below: http://learningsolaris.com/archives/2009/03/16/opensolaris-sun-secure-global-desktop/ Unfortunately, a google ad covers up the beginning part of the article, but if you want to read the whole thing you could just go here: http://learningsolaris.com/ and scroll down past the zones part to where it talks about Secure Global Desktop being broken on Indiana. This is really too bad, because SGD is a great product. I also think the networking parts of the dtrace toolkit (like tcptop and tcpsnoop) are also broken on 2008.11 which is too bad because they are great on Solaris 10. (3) There's no sparseroot zones in Indiana, as far as I can tell, which is too bad because they were a killer feature in Solaris 10. (4) There's no flash archive / flarcreate in Indiana. Again, too bad, because this was one of the main reasons people liked Solaris 10 too much. and most importantly (4) I really liked the dark blue colors in the Indiana 2008.05 default theme but now in 2008.11, all the default background colors are way too bright. It's really painful to stare at the background screen for a long time when you're using the 2008.11 Live CD to rescue a broken system if you are someone who works on computers for 8 to 10 hours a day and is always looking at a monitor (it's like staring at a light bulb all day). I fixed it by changing the GNOME settings over to my own custom theme on my already installed 2008.11 computers, but I guess I'm just going to have to write a shell script that snapshots all the settings and images that make up the 2008.05 theme and moves them over to 2008.11 if I want my relaxing dark blue colors back (ergonomics and aesthetics are IMO very under-appreciated in the UNIX community and 2008.05 was one of the first UNIX operating systems I've ever used that really hit a home run in this area only to have the work undone by the bright spotlight shining in your face that is 2008.11). I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we as a community are going to get all of these issues worked out in time :-) I just thought I'd broadcast this information out there so that other people would see if and maybe think about some of these issues that I'm sure were bothering a lot of other people besides just me. Other than that, keep up the good work! I'm really looking forward to the next release. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
