Hi Jonathan, Thanks for getting back to me. I actually had mentioned this to someone that replied to me so as to give a little purpose for the exploration and as to why I was interested in SmartOS specifically over OpenIndiana which was suggested as well.
For this POC project there are 2 area that I am considering, but the key to wanting to use SmartOS is that it has a very small cloud level footprint and is geared toward just being a hypervisor which is exactly what I need. I do not really want all of the extra fluff that is included in other Illumos-based distributions that are geared towards being more of a "general" OS. This is really more towards an extreme minimalist hypervisor approach without the external clustering at this step which may come up in a future discussion. The 2 areas that I am seeking to explore with SmartOS are these: 1.) Possibly adding a GUI over the CLI for local administration. (i.e. very simple and small XServer although there are a number of possible options (MicroXWin, Y Window System, Wayland Display Server, DirectFB, Xynth Window System, Fresco, Metisse, and KDrive "or TinyX" which may/may not work with Ilumos-based systems) 2.) Ultimately, I would also really like to have a local XServer with just a single VNC/Spice client either in the global zone or another zone so that I can remote into the other local zones. These are the current interests for this basic exploration. Of course, Triton SDC and Danube have it covered for clustering in the much larger data center approach and this was mainly just to play around with local hypervisors on a single system. The idea is a simple, but very tight, and extremely small footprint hypervisor and SmartOS seemed to be the best candidate thus far. Cheers, and just playing with some ideas, Lonnie On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 8:30 AM, Jonathan Perkin <[email protected]> wrote: > * On 2017-10-24 at 23:19 BST, Lonnie Cumberland wrote: > > > Long story short, I think that I would like to take a copy of SmartOS and > > see about adding a very small XServer and just one X-application to the > > global zone. > > > > With this in mind, I was wondering if anyone has done something similar, > or > > might be able to offer some guidance as I am really coming from the > > Windows/Linux world and my Solaris background is very limited. > > It's possible but will require you to build your own version of > SmartOS. Off the top of my head you'll need to include at least the > xsvc driver, as well as pre-populating the required users. It's not > particularly difficult, but will require quite a bit of trial and > error until you have everything necessary baked into your image. > > For what it's worth I use Tribblix as my test distribution for the > illumos pkgsrc packages, it's a nice small distribution that generally > gets out of the way and lets me focus on testing our packages to > ensure they work across illumos distributions. My test usually > involves installing a full set of Xorg and some desktop environment > which works fine so that is certainly one alternative option. > > Cheers, > > -- > Jonathan Perkin - Joyent, Inc. - www.joyent.com > ------------------------------------------- smartos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/184463/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/184463/25769125-55cfbc00 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=25769125&id_secret=25769125-7688e9fb Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
