I should like to say that from my perspective as the person who started this thread I consider your results 100% successful.
My goal was to increase the involvement of the user community in the process of creating a new release. It is a tremendous amount of work and many of us such as myself have been far too passive. My profound thanks for your efforts. Reg On Friday, April 23, 2021, 08:06:23 PM CDT, Nelson H. F. Beebe <be...@math.utah.edu> wrote: This progress report is 2/3 positive. I reported yesterday of my problems with frozen mouse cursor in the GUI install from http://dlc.openindiana.org/isos/hipster/test/OI-hipster-gui-20210405.iso on CentOS 7.9.2009 with virt-manager 1.5.0 and qemu-system-x86_64 2.0.0. Later that day, I repeated that experiment on Ubuntu 20.04, which has virt-manager 2.2.1 and qemu-system-x86_64 4.2.1, considerably newer than the versions available on CentOS 7.9.2009, but found that the installation would not proceed because of missing audio and console drivers. After my posting, I turned to other unrelated projects, had a night's sleep, and woke up with an idea for OpenIndiana. The virt-manager console for configuring a virtual machine has only one driver for each of mouse and keyboard, but it has THREE for the video controller: QXL (default), VGA, and Virtio. It has been rare to have to use other than the default video type, so I normally don't even think about changing the default. For OpenIndiana on Ubuntu 20.04, I shutdown the stuck installer, powered off the VM, changed to VGA, rebooted, and found that the installer would then not produce a GUI display, but only a bare console. I powered off again, changed to Virtio, and this time, the installer worked and the installation completed! It then asked me to reboot, which I did, and it came up normally. I immediately shut it down, took a virt-manager snapshot, brought it up, ran "pkg install build-essential", powered off, took another snapshot, powered on, installed more packages and user accounts, powered off, took yet another snapshot, powered on, and I now have a working system on which I'm attempting to build TeX Live 2021 (see my reports for other systems at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/texlive-utah/ ). Later this morning, I returned to my campus office in order to meet with a colleague who is a network and ZFS expert with long experience in the Solaris family. We tried to find a way to get past the boot failure on CentOS 7.9.2009, which I reported yesterday said Loading unix... Loading /platform/i86pc/amd64/boot_archive... ZFS: i/o error - all block copies available ... No rootfs module provided, aborting That happens early in the boot process, well before there is any chance to try to revert to an earlier boot environment. Despite Web searching last night and today, and finding others have reported a similar problem with ZFS on Solaris and FreeBSD, none of their proposed fixes worked. So, a new OpenIndiana on CentOS 7.9.2009 remains out of reach. Finally, I tried the GUI installer on VirtualBox on a small memory Ubuntu 20.04 system. There, the installer worked flawlessly, including a following "pkg install build-essential" and "pkg update" and subsequent reboot. No configuration changes whatever were needed. So, I now have 2 working OpenIndiana Hipster 2020.10 systems out of 4 attempts, and I can now get on with actually putting these VMs to doing useful work. It might be useful to add a README file to the download site that summarizes the lessons: VirtualBox: 20210405 unstaller works perfectly newer virt-manager/QEMU: change video to Virtio from default QXL older virt-manager/QEMU: probably unworkable along with notes for other physical systems were people have gotten successful installs, including instructions about what list members have learned about the various NVIDIA driver choices. Next week, when I'm back in my campus office, I may try to install OpenIndiana with OVIRT/Qemu, our third virtualization platform: it is newer than the virt-manager on CentOS 7, and offers the nice feature of live VM migration across our multiple physical VM servers, but is considerably more painful to manage and configure VMs for. If OpenIndiana developers remember to post notices about new ISO images added at http://dlc.openindiana.org/isos/hipster/test/ then I'm certainly willing to try new VM installations; our experience this week should speed up their creation. ---------------------------------------- Some background and comments of support: Our use of SunOS, and later Solaris, began in 1987, and we were predominantly based on Sun hardware until Sun was bought by Oracle in 2010. After that, Oracle hardware pricing made their products unaffordable for our always meager academic budgets. Since then, our backbone servers have been mostly Dell, IBM, and HP hardware running Red Hat, CentOS, Ubuntu, and ArchLinux, with hundreds of VMs in our test lab running other operating systems. Over our 33+ years of use, SunOS/Solaris has always been rock solid, and Sun hardware (MC68K, SPARC, x86, and x86_64) was too. We now have about 120 physical and virtual systems using ZFS, including multiple Linux distributions, FreeBSD, soon NetBSD, and of course all of the Solaris family O/Ses. In 15+ years of ZFS and hundreds of TB of storage, we have never lost data from filesystem corruption or disk failures. We would like to see that record of solidity continue with OpenIndiana. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: be...@math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 be...@acm.org be...@computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: be...@math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 be...@acm.org be...@computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss _______________________________________________ openindiana-discuss mailing list openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss