On Mon, 30 Jul 2007, James Carlson wrote: > I think I'm one of the command-line geeks this message refers to > somewhat indirectly. My idea of a "GUI" is still twm with xterms and > emacs windows, and I wouldn't really want to have it any other way. > > Just the same, I think having an environment available that can hide > all of that away and that is robust enough that it's able to do so > when things are going wrong would be great. I just suspect that it's > far harder (read: expensive) to make that work in any reliable way > than most would suppose.
This type of open thinking is good, because there's not a lot of Jim Carlsons in the world. If we want to grow Solaris, we need to focus on areas which can allow more users to use Solaris seamlessly. This is exactly what our CEO has pointed out with Ubunto, and after last weeks allhands, I installed Ubunto on one of my computers. I honestly don't see Solaris as being too much different, albeit where Ubuntu has a leg up is in getting the bits on your computer, and updating them. First, during the install I selected some type of "Guided partition/resize", thinking it would guide me through using fdisk or equivilant...bzzzt, wrong answer, and turned the computer off as it started to repartition the disk with whatever values were on a slider, which one was evidentally supposed to adjust before continuing. Next time around I did a manual install, and set the disk as I wanted (and no, I didn't loose any of the data on the computer). So, I get it installed, all the hardware was detected, and all is running, but on DHCP, not how I wanted it configured, but running none the less. So, one of the reasons I did want to install Ubuntu is that I have an opensource library which one of the Ubuntu developers wants to putback to Debian, and I am updating the name to prevent name collision with another library. Ah, but Ubunto doesn't install automake/autoconf/libtool by default, it's more user oriented. This is important, because I am similar to you in the regard that I just want this command tool that I need to use, and in this case I don't care about a GUI, but searching through the update GUI, I can't find any of the tools to save my life. Lucky for me, I am pretty familiar with Debian, which Ubuntu is based on, and can open a terminal, edit my sources.lst, do an apt-get update, and pull the packages down I wanted...including KDE/Kubuntu, and other stuff...but those pieces are not available through the default GUIs, AFAICT, with a default install. It's always kewl to see a large bundle like KDE pulling down 297 packages to install all it's glory... >From a developer perspective, Ubuntu is no better than Solaris, IMO. Because even though it does get bits on the computer better, the bits are focused for a simpleton. Yes, I think we do need to attract these simpletons...so we have a double edge sword of adoption/attraction. I do wonder why we need to have a different GNOME desktop? Well, I know why we do it (i.e., JDS), but I'm not sure why we should. It only diverges us from the mainstream, and makes things different. Seems better to leverage the mainstream GNOME project to me, and be the same, the Ubuntu uses a stock GNOME desktop, AFAICT. Would be nice to see our desktop folks working on implementing solutions for out environment, rather than adding lipstick to the pig, for instance...wouldn't it be nice to grab a context menu and be able to get the information for "zfs list"? Well, for you it wouldn't, but for me it might. It confuses me that zfs has been out for about a year and a half and we don't see our desktop folks doing that type of simple integration. Being able to take snapshots, list information on zfs filesystems, or getting the status of a zpool, those are all things that should be available for the user. OTOH, we're making quite a bit of progress, we even have some wifi solutions in place, a modern X server, native OpenGL drivers for nvidia, and some basic power management, acceptable audio, much better x86 support with Sun finally selling x86 based systems. This is quite a bit better than we were a couple years ago, when S10 was released. Unfortunately our power play is zfs, and we don't have the abiltiy to boot and/or configure the system for it at install time. This will need to be transparent to the user, and to the user there should be little if any difference than using ufs, fat, ext2/3, <gasp> reiserfs, or other. Long story short, we need to retain the Jim Carlson users of the community, and be able to attract more of them, but at the same time we need to attract the simpletons to really drive adoption. This will take some jugglin', IMO, to keep all happy. -- Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 IHV/OEM Group _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
