* Anon Y Mous (music_anal...@yahoo.com) wrote: > 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.).
You're kidding right? A google search will take all of 15 seconds to find how to setup a static IP address on OpenSolaris post-installation. As for installing GNOME/X, disk is cheap. And if you disable GDM after installation, GNOME/X won't be running and taking up any RAM/CPU cycles. And if the disk space really bothers you, how hard would it be to remove the GNOME/X-windows packages by hand? Perhaps an afternoon's worth of work (if that) at which point you then have a recipe that you can plug into your own custom script so that future installs can be tailored until we implement package selection during installation. As for selling OpenSolaris servers to companies like Google and the rest, that's really not an issue. I suspect Sun/Oracle will sell *Solaris* servers more often than not and how those are installed will likely not be via the gui-install method and more likely via AI or the text installer which is under development. Both of which allow for greater flexibility (on purpose) for installation. > 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. It's also interesting that Ubuntu Desktop, Fedora and Mac OS X (just to name a couple off the top of my head) don't let you assign one during installation. Different strokes for different folks. What you see today in the OpenSolaris distribution in terms of how it's installed and what it's capabilities are is *not* what will be available for the next enterprise release of Solaris. The Install team has said all along that the changes we are delivering in OpenSolaris are being done *incrementally* and not fully-finished implementations that cover all possible uses. As such, features that were deemed important for the target audience of the OpenSolaris distribution were given higher priority than others (that makes sense, doesn't it). > 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. You're entitled to your opinion of course. However there's no way to quantify what you're saying. And I personally don't necessarily agree with what you're suggesting. The OpenSolaris distribution was always targeted at Developers using laptops (more so Developers). Enterprising individuals with just a little bit of effort could (and have) taken OpenSolaris and tweaked it to perform on a broader base than Developers with laptops. That's possible because underneath, OpenSolaris the distribution incorporates a lot of the same code/functionality that exists in Solaris 10 and Solaris Express. Cheers, -- Glenn _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
