On 01/17/11 05:44 AM, Alasdair Lumsden wrote:
Hi Gabriel,
On 01/17/11 10:07 AM, Gabriel de la Cruz wrote:
Thanks!
A place to start is a place to start, and an stable server release is
the most urgent one among all the other options.
Great - thanks for the feedback!
Some people is talking about the server-desktop question, I
particularly liked the old Solaris software groups concept (reduced
network, core, end user, entire)... woulnt it be posible to have a non
stable distro featuring the full range of up to date software, and a
stable conservative one (behind in innovation but ahead in stability)
allowing to either just keep the fully suported core of software or to
add as well a less supported desktop enviroment?. Wouldnt this be
almost same effort, example:
Well, the thing is, this is already the case. All people have to do is
use the Text Installer ISO (Or the Automated Installer ISO) - this
installs a much smaller subset of software which doesn't include the
full Gnome desktop software. Effectively the text installer ISO is the
"server release" and the Live CD ISO is the "desktop release". Perhaps
we need to name them such to avoid the confusion, as it seems a lot of
people on-list are confused about this.
Unfortunately the Text Installer still installs quite a "fat" install,
due to some packaging that needs improvement. Alan Coopersmith pointed
us at some bugs on bugs.opensolaris.org related to this which was pretty
helpful:
http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=7010355
- splitting tk bindings out of the core python package
http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=7010324
- splitting X apps out of the core groff package
http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6574610
- splitting glib out of the gnome-base-libs package
The only differences between a server install and a desktop install are
the packages installed, and they're already split up into fairly
reasonable incorporations. I think the situation with OpenSolaris only
having a graphical LiveCD for so long has led people to think that
OpenSolaris and thus OpenIndiana is mainly a desktop OS.
So I am starting to think that we should rename the Live CD to
OpenIndiana-Desktop and the Text Installer to OpenIndiana-Server.
Ideally the graphical installer, Caiman, would let you choose which
package incorporations to install. But unfortunately I think it does a
"dumb" install from a cpio archive.
Perhaps refactoring of Caiman is needed, where the Live CD ships with a
pkg repo, starts a pkg server, and does an install from that. Not sure
how feasible this would be. Given how complete pkg is, probably not all
that hard.
We looked into this a little quite some time ago. The problem with
doing IPS-based installation from CD's or DVD's is that IPS's data
access patterns during package installation are relatively random, not
streaming, and so you will get utterly abysmal installation performance
(orders of magnitude worse than anything you've ever used) when using
physical CD or DVD media. That storage technology just isn't designed
for random access. This doesn't apply much if you're using an ISO image
as a virtual CD or using USB flash memory media.
Dave
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