ok, this month i finally choose opensolaris to be my personal OS in my office
cuz all this cool techs like crossbow, xvm, dtrace, etc. that i didnt have in
kubuntu 9.10. so i downloaded osol 9/06, at moment installation was fine, zfs
running, sky was very blue, etc. now after installation i noticed at first
boot a huge load of problems and very sick things at user lvl too but not after
migrate all nigth my 300 gb of data from my server, so i need your help with
the following issues cuz i dont wanna go back to transfer 300gb to linux :(.
im not a newbie on unix, actually i have 10 years working with linux and C++, i
even make my own super optimized distro few years ago but i was lazy to
maintain it so i stick to gentoo and ubuntu through the years
well osol is running on a laptop acer full intel aka gfx, mobo, wifi, sound,
etc.
running osol snv 126 and 111
SHOWSTOPPER ISSUES
1. no audio, in any snv i tried so far, is even worse cuz audiohd drivers is
loaded, no visible dmesg issues at kernel loading either, the gnome mixer show
me all parameter, but any application that uses audio just deadlock even flash
player. so basically i cant hear music in any form or watch anything on
internet with audio cuz even firefox deadlock too.
2. video in intel gfx, in svn 111 with default repositories is a bad joke, in
that repo there isnt even software enough to make a demo, so i have to change
it to dev one wich is heavily simple but at least i can install sun studio and
some basic tools so is not as useless as the default one, but in snv 126 the
desktop mouse/keyboard freeze for 1 sec every 10 sec. i assume is fault of
intel driver version but i cant upgrade it cuz i just cant compile the xorg
source here and well google and me gived up trying to find any info on howto
build this driver from sources. btw this glitch is ultra annoying and yes
xorg.log is clean. so far osol owned me here
3.console test, another issues to upgrade to snv 126 is now i cant see what im
typing in the console but i can see the result so i assume is some
configuration mismatch but i cant find it.
GETTING IN MY NERVES ISSUES:
1. package system: well i dont wanna be rude here but osol packages system is
absolutely horrible, i mean really terrible, in fact the only memory of
something this terrible was the SCO installation system in the 90's and man
seriously suicide never looked more real to me than then, to be more precise
here are some detailed issues.
a:) im sure it cant be slower, it feels like trying to transfers a mammut
through a very tiny hole
b:) repositories are really nasty slow to update
c:) the packaging name convention is sick, there is no easy way to check
any version of wth is installing in my OS really SUNWWWXXX -3.3.1
09827266277483 is not nice
d:) most package names are useless, i mean SUNWXXXxxxxxxx description a
library for system xxxx and btw wth mean SUNW, is only sun code?, means is not
compatible with any software not sun?, just for fun?, optimized?, SUN way?.
e:) unlike any other package manager, i dont know what is happening in the
installation process beside the fact the package got downloaded and well trust
it actually got installed.
f:) well im seriously suspecting it just dont resolve dependencies, cuz not
matter what i check it dont inform about anything, so lol here
g:)well for an enterprise driven OS i assume i can somehow have a local
mirror from repos, cuz like this i will have to stop my entire office for a
month only to download the update and basic tools
2. software availability: im surprised of how much work requires to get some
basic software like dunno inkscape to work here, even nexenta as old as it is
have it working, lol not even the gimp. well somehow i suspect this issue is
linked to the installer system. so rigth now for me move to osol represent go
back to a basic kernel and basically compile from sources everything else, for
me is not such an issue but for god sake at least make all basic gnu
compilation tool available in repos so is a bit less heavy the compilation
3. SunStudio: well ok i admit it, i wanna use sun studio cuz i love optimized
C/C++ compilers but lol 800mb download, i mean was so hard to separate it into
several packages like gcc, dunno like basic C compiler then C++ support, then
java runtime then other languages and the ide for example so i dont have to
colapse my network to download it when i basicly just wanna compile some C
stuff, btw sun studio express 780mb so no it doesnt help at all
4. Path and devices names: im used to the crazy nasty way of solaris to name
the devices, but dont expect any normal person to like it, you should consider
take the linux approach here instead of the solaris one, aka my father with
kubuntu 9.10 laptop (his personal laptop), mine with osol
kubuntu osol
/dev/sda for my father means /dev/dsk/c9t0d0p0:1 for my father means
devices, sata disk, number 1 almost brain damage
not a big deal
eth0. wlan0, isdn0 for my well here is always different bge, ath,
hme, etc
father means his ethernet for my father after several tries still
where is my
card or his wifi, etc network card and my wifi??
i know that for server with several network devices this is the rigth approach
but for users with normal pc's you need a more linux like approach to make it
simpler to understand, my idea here maybe at install time select server or pc
and then through symlinks change interfaces names maybe?
5. install and updates rollback: sweet but now i have 5 solaris completly
different in updates and software lol, but errmmm how i remove the old ones??
remember that pc are not sparc system with several TB of disk so have N numbers
of solaris systems floating around is not nice for my 500gb laptop disk
6. Sun Techs: if you read osol new super futuristic tech include now, well like
me you will come to see it, cuz some are really really interesting, but errrmm
now that i actually installed it well sure the tech are here but the only way
to noticed it is googling and console cuz not even osol nautilus show zfs
rollback for example and i dont like the fact that there is no easy way to find
out howto implement those in any other software, for example i would be happy
to at least add to kde dolphin system the zfs features. maybe im wrong but i
really tried to find info in opensolaris.org or google and i cant find anything
useful like an sdk, code example, documentation etc or maybe is in another site
but that info should be very easy to find if you want new devs help to
propagate the use of this techs in a near future
everything else seems fine so far, dont get this wrong i like the os so far but
this issues need to be adressed if you want to at least compete with linux or
bsd in a non server sector. about package management APT is the way to go
really go and try it and you'll see the difference
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This message posted from opensolaris.org
