Now, just to keep the record straight. I'm not in 100% agreement with Ben Rockwood (maybe only 96% agreement).
I actually love Indiana and run it as my main day-to-day desktop OS. The problem is that you can't use Indiana as a minimal server OS in production because the Caiman installer does not let you assign a static IP address (who uses DHCP for servers?) and there is no way to choose not to install the GNOME desktop (none of my servers have X-windows on them as it wastes precious hard drive space, RAM and CPU cycles- this is something that is important to take note of if Sun ever wants to sell OpenSolaris servers to companies like Google, Akamai, Amazon, etc.). I personally know of at least 3 very large dedicated server companies that were all ready to sell OpenSolaris 2008.05 as a product on their dedicated servers, but as soon as they realized that there was no way to assign a static IP address during the Caiman installation process coupled with the fact that the people who were installing these servers were graduates from Devry or ITT Tech who had no idea how to configure a static IP address at the command line in OpenSolaris 2008.05, the companies eventually realized that it was hopeless trying to use a desktop focused O.S. on servers and gave up on it (they are now considering using Nexenta instead of Sun's OpenSolaris because the Nexenta Core installer does not force you to install X-windows and lets you assign a static IP address as part of the installation process). It's interesting that Red Hat Linux, Ubuntu Server, Solaris 10 and even Windows Server 2003 all let you assign a static IP address as part of the installation process but the OpenSolaris Caiman installer does not. Overall, it's too bad, because Sun could have really made a lot of money on support contracts for OpenSolaris 2008.05, 2008.11 and 2009.06 if they just came out with an officially supported minimal JEOS server version with no X-windows that lets you assign a static IP address during the install and then come up with SSH and nothing else running on the server so that the customer can SSH in to the box and "pkg install" some software and configure it to their liking. If they had done this from the start, I'm sure that the OpenSolaris project would have made so much money from server support contracts after one year that the project would have literally paid for itself. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
