choochoo wrote: > I am being critical here but I'm not angry. Just not > really impressed. > several years ago Sun was kind of promoting Open > Solaris as being a viable alternative to MS Windows. > But they didn't really inform people that it really > was not user friendly, plug and play and for the > common person. Least ways that was my observation.
As others have said, welcome aboard. You are absolutely correct in your statement above: OpenSolaris, or any Unix for that matter, is NOT user friendly and probably never will be. The original Unix ethos is, as Evi Nemeth so well stated, "It's a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit there." Put another way, working with any system will be in two main phases: 1. Learning the system 2. Using the system When faced with a choice between making something easier to learn or to use, most of Unix, especially vi and C, lean toward making things harder to learn and easier to use. I suspect the rationale is that you will learn once and use for years, so make the use part easy even if makes the learn part very, very hard. You will see this same theme over and over in all Unix systems. > I think in today's age all necessary drivers should > be included in the install. What I mean is for common > everyday off the shelf brand name computers, that you > plan to convert over. Or the drivers should be > downloadable and put on the live cd, while creating > the live CD, at the Sun website with Open Solaris. Others have or will discuss this in great detail, but this has legal ramifications for most things. For what it's worth, try to install generic Windows on any recent machine. A few weeks ago I installed Windows 7 on an 18 month old HP laptop and had driver issues similar to that with an Ubuntu or OSol install. I guess I am saying this isn't just an OSol thing. > At the partition screen I did NOT see a description > of how big the HD was (160gig). > I saw I think 4 partition options. one was set as > unknown 12g, I presumed that was the windows > partition, but I think I was wrong as after install > no more windows. > I set one partition to 20.1 g for solaris for further > expansion of programs and data. But I think it may be > using the entire hard drive anyway. Yeah, about partitions. I have performed in various Solaris SA capacities since back in the 2.2 days (early 1990s) and maybe some insight will make the frustration a little less painful. Up through recent versions of Solaris (not sure about the 10 stuff today), Sun was religious about ensuring full backward compatibility. When I left one company in 2005 they were running a 1993 build of the Oracle DB against the latest Solaris on the latest 64-bit hardware. You'll find that most technologies are in various states, from being experimental new and cool, to stable and widely deployed, to being legacy and no longer used for new stuff. At any moment in time, there are several technologies that are in transition from the old to the new. The problem is that all of the old "cruft" that was once cool is still around, no matter how lame it looks today. Back to partitions. Back in the 1990s, Solaris had it's own partitioning strategy which allocated 8 "slices" (aka partitions) on each disk and it was perfectly ok for them to overlap. Historically slice 0 was the root partition, 2 was the whole disk (used for backup) and so on. Along comes the DOS/Windows with its own partitioning strategy which has up to four primary partitions with the fourth partition able to be an "extended" partition containing four partitions of its own. DOS partition tables and Solaris partition tables were completely incompatible. At some point, Solaris caved in and started putting its 8, later upgraded to 10, "slices" inside a single DOS partition. To make things even more strange, there has been a push to move to EFI partitions which have many advantages, but not every BIOS can boot from those. Almost all non-boot disks in OSol are EFI and the boot disk is a DOS partition of type "Solaris2" which contains several slices. This same transition weirdness can be found all over the place. For example, a shell is like command.com, but in Unix there are several to choose from and originally most systems used the Bourne shell as an upgrade from the Thompson shell. Since then, BSD brought us the incompatible c shell, an extension arrived called the tc shell (which still exists for legacy stuff), David Korn grossly enhanced the Bourne shell and introduced some incompatibilities, calling it the Korn shell, David made an upgrade (introducing more incompatibilities) and gave us ksh93. The Linux crowd enhanced the Bourne shell and gave us bash: Bourne Again SHell. A lot of system scripts were written against the Bourne shell, so most systems include that shell and run system scripts against them, however antiquated that shell may seem today. Want more? Solaris traditionally handled package management through the pkgadd and pkgrm (among other) commands. OSol had BFU for a while and I think it's mostly gone now. You will see references to IPS packages and I have no clue what those are. The current trend is for OSol to use the pkg command (do not confuse it with the completely different pkgadd and pkgrm commands). Most Osol stuff uses the new pkg command and most third parties will use the old pkgadd system because pkg is not supported (last I checked) on Solaris, but pkgadd is supported on both Solaris and OpenSolaris. It gets better. Back in the day all subsystems were started and stopped with scripts in /etc/rc?.d/ where ? represents a "run level." Now most subsystems are handled by smf, the service management facility. There is still overlap on those too. If you want to reboot a machine, you can type "init 6" or "reboot" or "shutdown -g0 -i 6" and there probably are even more ways, due to more legacy cruft. If you want the machine to recognize new hardware (reconfigure) at next boot, you can type "boot -- -r" or create a file called /reconfigure or add the "-r" boot flag via grub. My current confusion arises from CIFS (or is it SMB?) sharing with Windows machines. The old way was to install samba, but now there is some kernel module, and you can even automatically share via a zfs variable for a file system. I don't know which I am using and which is the current blessed approach. Most documentation I have found discusses the smb/server service, but I also have the shares/group:smb service running and I have a samba config file. I read somewhere that the zfs approach is being phased out, so I have no idea which service is what and which one I want to be using or how to use it. I have the same confusion surrounding NFS. I guess my point is that Unix installations are long-lived so every cool piece of technology over the last 10+ years will be on the system and it's not at all clear which is there to support old stuff and which should be used for new deployments. As a new user, I can see how completely baffled you are, but hang in there. > My feeling is, there should be a driver in the OS for > this, so after install you can access internet and > network at least for all off the shelf factory > configured laptops. Again, try to do the same thing with generic Windows on an off the shelf factory laptop. Just like a pre-built laptop has all of the drivers for the installed Windows, every new Sun box has Solaris and all of the drivers installed and ready to go. > Windows uses *.exe or *.com as the execution file. > most times double click it and it starts running the > program. OS as other linuxs/ unix don't do this, so > a small help booklet (online) would be nice to > explain these little things (I haven't found it > yet). In Unix, everything, and I mean everything (a disk, a tape, a directory, a network device, the screen, the mouse, the USB bus, etc.) is a file. There are no exceptions. Some are "regular" files which can be executed. Some can be read. Some can be written to. Extensions have no implicit meaning to the operating system, but may have meaning to some programs. For example, *.c files are generally C program files, but that's by convention and is not enforced. Since extensions (from a DOS perspective) have no real meaning in Unix, you can have any number of "extensions" to a file, e.g. a file name This.txt.file.com.exe.gz.c.anything.I.want.to.put.after.any.dot. > Next the explorer or computer analyzer. > I see two different menu selections depending on what > you want to do. I would like to see these combined > into one as it appears they overlap in what they do. Now you are headed into the GUI aspect of Unix, which is completely disconnected from core Unix, unlike Windows which has the GUI and the OS glued together. It would probably take thousands of pages to explain the Unix GUI mindset, but suffice it to say that in Unix, a GUI is just like any other set of programs and you can run as many as you want for as many users as you want. OSol defaults to GNOME these days, but in the past it defaulted to CDE and OpenLook before that. At any moment in time some users could be running GNOME, other users running KDE (GNOME's main competitor), other users running CDE, some running twm, some running Athena, some running Motif, etc. The GUI in Unix is no more tied to the OS than a particular game is tied to Windows. In fact, many Unix systems run with no GUI at all, just like many Windows systems have no game installed. > I will let you know my progress and if things get > better. Either way it's a fun learning experience! Again, welcome and stay in there. Most would agree that once past the learning curve, the rewards are well worth it. Cheers, Marty -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
