Jisakiel,
Thanks for the good feedback. Some of what you are experiencing is
due to the rough edges, but please know that we all want to improve
OpenSolaris.
The driver issue will always be a plague. Please run the Hardware
Device Detection Tool and submit the results.
More comments below...
Jisakiel wrote:
> I'd agree on Opensolaris being "too much work" right now for a common
> user. As a student trying out opensolaris partly because of working as
> a newbie sysadmin, and partly because of *wanting* zfs on my file /
> web / svn server, I definitely find the learning curve as too step and
> unrewarding so far (it reminds me to my beginnings with vim).
>
>
> I find unreasonable to appeal to a student and his laptop mainly
> because of hardware support and power consumption. Until very recently
> not even linux (which I am quite experienced on) could reliably
> suspend and resume on most laptops, and the battery lasted much less
> than on windows. That trend has definitely changed, and it's one of
> the driving forces behind ubuntu adoption in my university (in Madrid,
> Spain just FYI). I understand the difficulties in getting proper power
> management support on any OS, but until that any student using a
> laptop will really think twice using opensolaris if the battery lasts
> half as long as with linux (which I, however, didn't try as I don't
> have the free space).
>
>
> The other driving force, by the way, has been so far *ease of use*.
> Long, twitchy command lines don't scare a long time gentooer as me ;),
> but even I can appreciate not having to spend half an hour trying to
> setup *anything*. Lately, linux distros have evolved quite quick in
> that regard: printers work by default, sharing using NFS or samba is
> quite easy, networkmanager handles perfectly the wifi and ethernet
> needs, and installing packages *and finding them* is quite easy with
> synaptic - even "complex" packages such as anything apache-based,
> eclipse plugins, whatever. As well, system upgrades appear as a
> tooltip with descriptions for the issues solved, etc. I personally
> find the experience even easier than windows (true that I'm quite used
> to it by now).
>
Note: many of these things are easier in SXCE because all of the
pertinent software is already installed by default.
To share with NFS:
System -> Administration -> Shared Folders Click, click, done.
To share with SMB:
System -> Administration -> Package Manager
Search for and select SUNWsmba
Install/Update
Note: you might need to reboot to get the Samba service
properly registered, I haven't tried this on-the-fly
[yes, this is why I complain about not having a DVD distribution
SXCE does not require the previous step]
System -> Administration -> Shared Folders Click, click, done.
If I plug in my printer, I get a nice little configuration screen.
Unfortunately, there are only a few possible printer selections
in the default OpenSolaris, so you might have better luck using
the (butugly) print manager. Or, if you want to configure a network
printer:
System -> Administration -> Print Manager Click, click, click, done.
Installing packages (still needs some work to search and add repositories)
System -> Administration -> Package Manager Click, click, click, done.
Network management should be automagic (network automagic -- nwam).
But if you really want to turn the knobs, disable nwam
System -> Administration -> Services
uncheck "physical network interface autoconfiguration"
System -> Administration -> Network Click, click, done.
You might also want to add a network monitor applet to your desktop
menu bar.
+Add to Panel... Network Monitor
>
> Solaris, or Opensolaris, does not have any of those luxuries right
> now. I greatly look forward to Opensolaris efforts to succeed, as I
> find the idea of "making solaris more like debian" quite clever in
> order to get the benefits linux does (mainly, ease of package
> management and upgrading, here greatly enhanced by zfs magic). However
> lots need to be done: it's not reasonable for a student *playing* with
> something to expect to read the whole beadm man page, or to find by
> himself how to export by nfs by inmersing in the huge and highly
> detailed doc pages from sun.
>
>
> Small things don't help as well: if I'm just toying in my free time,
> all those small annoying things can be really frustrating, making
> yourself abandon before having had time to like the system. In
> particular, nv_sata forcing me to find a usb cd drive, broadcom
> gigabit network card not being supported out of the box, and not
> working with the driver provided forcing me to buy another pci one,
> keyboard locale being outright *weird* for an es_ES user such as me
> when compared to any linux (home / end / DELETE / control-cursor not
> working as expected) ... and the general frustration of not knowing
> where to look for the answers such as "how do services work compared
> to init.d", "where is everything I'm used to such as /etc/exports",
> "what the **** happens to my mostly-but-not-fully-right keyboard
> locale", or "why can't I find nowhere an easy 1-2-3 guide to sharing
> with NFS or SMB"
>
Are we making this too easy by adding GUI tools? Personally,
I'd like to forget command line stuff, ASAP.
Or, are you more accustomed to the CLI and configuration files
which will never converge to a common set amongst all of the
OSes which use open source.
-- richard
>
> Comparing that to the ubuntu experience I had in my dell laptop (just
> installing and *everything* working right out of the box - webcam,
> remote control, resolution, 3D support -but not compiz-, suspend and
> hibernate, great default selection of packages...), those things
> really make the difference. I understand most of them only work
> because the relatively huge masses behind linux adoption and testing
> in all kinds of platforms, and as well because it evolves quite
> quickly to adapt to new hardware while being mature enough on the
> other basis such as APT.
>
>
> And that leads me to the additional thing linux (or even other
> alternatives such as freebsd, which I have also used a lot) have over
> OS right now: community support. I can easily find howtos for pretty
> much everything linux-based. Ubuntu and gentoo, in particular, excel
> at this. Freebsd handbook, being easily readable and quite exhaustive,
> could also be mentioned here. Even public bugtracking (submitting!)
> helps a lot here, as when you find a bug another poster has the
> solution even before integrated in the distro, or perhaps you can give
> a solution to a bug you've find quite easily. Community development
> starts that way...
>
>
> I'm still scratching my head on where to start to begin grokking this
> OS without being such a pain as to discourage me. For sure if it
> weren't for ZFS I wouldn't even try, with linux being *good enough*
> for me as a unix development platform, and quite easier to setup or
> modify (heck: apt-source whatever, edit, rebuild package, or even
> editing by hand shell scripts)
>
> Please don't take the whole rant as an attack or anything; I'm just a
> frustrated beginner here who just wants to state some reasons a
> "common computer science / engineering student" would throw in the
> towel, hoping that stating some problems perhaps not too visible for
> the already experienced can be useful to try to *improve* things.
>
>
> And keep up the good work nevertheless ;), debian 2.2 or gentoo 1.4
> were far more painful to install ;).
>
>
>
> --- El *mar, 8/7/08, Roman Strobl /<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>/* escribió:
>
> De: Roman Strobl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Asunto: Re: [indiana-discuss] new ISO soon?
> Para: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> CC: "MC" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [email protected]
> Fecha: martes, 8 julio, 2008 3:06
>
> Dennis Clarke wrote:
>
> > [...]
> > It is all too much like work. It doesn't matter if we are talking
> > Linux or UNIX. Once upon a time there was no real choice and we were
> > forced to install a UNIX system even for departmental level things.
> > There was always some head geek that took care of that server because
> > it is user hostile by design. Why would I think anything has changed
> > in that respect.
> >
> I think we need to start with the geeks and Linux geeks on universities
> are the right target audience to try to switch to OpenSolaris. Then we
> can expand further as OpenSolaris becomes easier to use in future
> releases. We can attract students/developers on the advantages of
> Solaris (ZFS, Dtrace, SMF, SunStudio, ...). But OpenSolaris needs to get
> easier to use to become accessible for wider audience (don't get me
> wrong, I think OpenSolaris 2008.05 is a
> tremendous progress in terms of
> ease of use compared to previous Solaris releases - it's the first
> release that I personally can use ;)
> > I look forwards to the Sparc versions. I have run headlong into a
> > brick wall on a few occasions because a user looks at me and asks "if
> > Sun makes the Sparc and the fancy flying Niagara that you love so much
> > and this is their big open source thing then why don't they have a
> > version for Sparc?"
> >
> > I don't know how to answer that at all.
> AFAIK the reason for not doing SPARC was that there wasn't enough time
> to get it done for 2008.05. The focus of 2008.05 were developers using
> laptops - we need students/developers start experimenting with
> OpenSolaris, and we needed something to get into their hands real soon.
>
> One reason for this is that in the past Solaris was quite popular on
> universities but this has changed with cheap Intel hardware
> and Linux.
> 2008.05 gives us an opportunity to re-introduce Solaris at universities,
> because it will work on hardware students use (well mostly). SPARC is
> very important for Sun of course but that's the next step when the focus
> will move towards deployment.
>
> -Roman
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