* Anon Y Mous ([email protected]) wrote: > 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:
Package selection during installation is something we have planned, but haven't gotten around to yet. > (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. :-( That's not true. You can use the Automated Installer. http://opensolaris.org/os/project/caiman/auto_install/ > (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. Keep in mind, the target audience of OpenSolaris 200x.x releases are developers first and foremost. That having been said, we're working towards including the types of things that Enterprises need which will show up in an Enterprise release of OpenSolaris. If you need Enterprise features like in Solaris 10, OpenSolaris/Indiana isn't there yet but it's getting better (and will continue to get better over time). Have you filed bugs on the dtrace toolkit issues (if in fact they actually exist)? I'd be pretty surprised if they didn't work. The networking stack in OpenSolaris is identical to the one in SXCE as is dtracetoolkit. > (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. Right, for lots of reasons. Suffice to say we're aware of people's desire for this type of functionality and we'll get around to implementing something eventually, but it won't be a port of Flash to OpenSolaris. > 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). This is most important? I have my own share of ergonomic/aesthetic issues but they by no means make my top-50 list of things we need to address. I can't wait for the day when this sort of thing is higher up the list, that'll mean we've made a heck of a lot of progress on making OpenSolaris the best it can be. :-) Cheers, -- Glenn _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
