Hi,
I've been trying (and finally succeeded after about 4 days) in installing 
OmniOS and wanted to give a little feedback. Since it was a very frustrating 
experience let me start with saying that, despite that I really enjoy OmniOS 
now that it is on the system ;) and that your guys work on the system is hugely 
appriciated. But I think that the install process can be improved, a lot.

From what I understand there are basically two ways to go, kayak, and the 
installer both have their problems, lets start with kayak sice I don't have 
much to say to that it's the path I did not choose.

Kayak might work well to add additional systems to a existing OmniOS 
installation but when starting off w/o a existing OmniOS system poses some 
problems, mostly the 'install wit hkayak from a non OmniOS OS' tels you to 
install OmniOS to copy the required files. So as a suggestion of improvment: 
package the required files somewhere easiely downlaodable and put a link in the 
manual. (If that link had existed I propably had went with kayak and you missed 
all the nice bugs I found in the isntaller ;)

The isntaller - it crashes, a lot, a lot lot. It crashes when:

- using 3TB disks
- entering partition sizes that do not fit (even so are not obviouysly wrong). 
i.e. if it tells you 110.8 GB are available you enter 110.8 -> crash (I guess 
it was something like 110.79).
- you select a disk with UEFI labels.
- randomly when cycling between parition types.
- basically any other place where you can enter data and it is not a perfectly 
valid value.

The problem with the crashing is that you need to start form scratch, and that 
can be painful.

In addition to that:

It does not allow you to select slices unless you manaually created more then 
one before hand. This can be very annoying since you need to drop out of the 
instaler to do that.

It can get into a state during slice selection where you can't change the type 
of slices any more, none could be marked as rpool

Generally unless you want a 1 full disk spanning rpool it will be a very 
painful experience requiring a lot of work in the console beforehand.

So now the 'complaining' is over on the installer and here a suggestion how to 
improve.

Since it will propably be very hard to make a good graphical installer and get 
rid of all the bugs (even so the crashes might be worth fixing) it would be 
very cool if there was a way to drop in the console, set up the disks/pools/etc 
and just tell the system: please skip the graphical thing, i created the rpool 
for you, now install the system in it and put grub onto disk <whatever>

Cheers,
Heinz

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