Garrett D'Amore wrote: ... >>> I have no idea if I can champion anything at all. But see my earlier >>> post with respect to "environments". At this point I would be strongly >>> in favor of picking up fvwm a basic Window Manger (not a whole desktop >>> environment) and putting it in the basic install (the same place that >>> twm is found) so that suninstall etc. can make use of it. I would _not_ >>> like this on a separate companion CD, because at that point it loses >>> most of its advantages (sysadmins can't "count on it being there", and >>> Sun can't use it for suninstall, etc.) >>> >> I'm doubtful that we're interested in it for Solaris installation. >> We're moving in the direction of providing a full Gnome desktop >> instead that lets you try things out before installing or while the >> install is happening. Other distributions might make other choices, I >> suppose, but that's what we're looking at for Sun's. > > I'm very disappointed to hear this, actually. >
Heh, I knew this was coming. But I don't think you should be disappointed, because the gains will outweigh any losses, but see below. > It means that it will almost certainly be the case that > > a) upgrades will be much harder, due to lack of sufficient swap > space for miniroot (or are you planning to provide a "live DVD" or some > such for install? Of course, that's harder with a CDROM.) > Yes, we are planning that it will be a live DVD, for all the reasons those are good. That's why I established the Live Media project on OpenSolaris. > b) systems with smaller memories are going to be unable to use the > graphical installer > Maybe, maybe not. That remains to be seen based on what we choose to do architecturally, but I believe that the current Live DVD will run in less memory than our current miniroot does. Fundamentally, though, if you've got less than 512 MB of memory, you're probably out of luck with a graphical install of most any mainstream OS in a year or two. > c) Solaris is abandoning the non-desktop/workstation use cases. > (One great thing about Solaris is that it is good for such a large > variety of classes of machines -- $1M servers, $1K 1U rack mount > servers, $1K workstations, and $30K workstations. Please don't forget > that.) > Absolutely untrue. We're trying to make it more attractive there, too. But most of those turn out to be either text installs or automated Jumpstart installs and so we will make improvements in those areas as well. The segment of systems which can't run Gnome for the installation (what you do after that is your business ;-) and won't happily use the text or Jumpstart options just doesn't appear to be large enough to justify our attention. > I wouldn't mind having a "live dvd" or somesuch installation available > as an option, but I would really, really like to keep the current fairly > minimalist graphics install (or something akin to it) as an option. > Well, we just can't please everyone with what we have available resource-wise. On the other hand, the architecture we'll be publishing soon is going to be open, of course, and we'll gladly consider how we can make it flexible enough for those who want to implement other choices, even if we choose not to produce them as options in Sun's distribution. I'd rather that the various OpenSolaris distro's cooperate here if possible. > Of course, I guess there is always the text based install, if that isn't > going away too. > Of course it's not going away. We have to install on systems without graphical consoles, and nobody would even remotely seriously suggest otherwise. > Gnome/JDS is a pig, and I don't see anyone trying to make it less so. > As a result, I'm unlikely to ever want to run it -- it doesn't offer so > much over the alternative desktop options to justify the bad impact on > system resources and performance that it incurs. But then again that's > just my opinion. > Yeah, everyone's got an opinion on that one. I'd wholeheartedly support effort to make Gnome more efficient, even though I don't find that it negatively impacts my productivity. But that might say as much about my productivity as it does about Gnome's efficiency ;^) Dave
