On 7/2/07, Moinak Ghosh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Daniel Griffith wrote: > > Using Solaris for the last few weeks has felt like travelling back in > > time > It would help if you elaborated on the issues you faced. If nothing else > it'd assist the Indiana cause :)
Yeah, I should have kept a diary – no maybe not because I probably would have thrown it out of a window or hit someone with it:) Where do I start? OK, first drivers. I was expecting issues and have no problems with the idea that choice of components depends on what drivers are available for Solaris – but I have major issues with Solaris drivers only working with certain versions of hardware firmware. I used a first generation Asus NForce 4 board. My first attempt at an install was of Solaris 10. Neither the included networking driver or Silicon Image driver worked. The solution was to use the latest version of Solaris Express and hack together a new bios for the machine with the latest 3114 firmware. So much for the "super reliable UNIX" when it is running on a machine with a homebrew bios:) Anyway, at least I had a working install. I had an immediate problem, at no point during the install process did I seem to get the option to create a user account, so after the install finished as you can't ssh in as root how the heck are you expected to get into the box???? Grr go to pull it out of the rack and fit a monitor:( That's an example of the continual little niggles I got while trying to use Solaris that you really wouldn't expect from a mature distribution – but hey maybe that particular problem is just an Express issue... Then I got hit by the well known issues of missing applications and the ones that are there behaving in unexpected ways:) The missing /root and finding out where the heck things like wget had been banished to. Then the pain really started – after a smooth setup of a RaidZ, I tried to get samba running... OK, I know about the history of Solaris and System V – but why the heck has Gentoo got a better implementation than Solaris??? The whole services mechanism in Solaris needs re-examining, I'm starting to get that the Solaris mentality is "if it ain't (completely) broke, don't fix it":) It needs taking out back and shooting:) Looking online, it seems that most peoples solution to use samba with Solaris 10 is to create their _own_ init.d scripts – huh??? And then don't get me started on webmin which can be enabled via svcadm and yet won't start until you manually run an init script!!! That's the kind of thing that you forgive on a Linux distribution made by one student and his dog to run ripped DVD's on a Xbox, but not from a commercial OS:( For me Solaris as it is, is a major time sink – things that you expect to be simple aren't, things that surely should work don't, and things that you hoped were lost in the history of computing come back to bite you on the bum! On the bright side: The numbering system for drives – initially confusing but has a huge advantage over the /dev/sda idea of Linux – remove a drive from a Linux box that also includes drives with software raid and watch in horror as your drives are renamed:) ZFS does what it says on the tin:) Nice:) But I could use FreeBSD with ZFS and avoid the headaches above, so why would the world rush to use Indiana if it is just Solaris on a CD – which is what some people here want. _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
