The Indiana Wishlist!

There has been quite a discussion after a new binary distribution of OpenSolaris, Project Indiana, was announced.

The opinions are flying around, but there are a few in the noise that want to see this come up. Here is my wishlist of things I want in Indiana:

*The base: Belenix. It would be the best starting point for Indiana. Indiana _has_ to be a LiveCD, as a try-before-you-install environment is essential to spread awareness and use. Moinak's work on clofi and the fast boot by rearranging files on the CD are a _must_ as these allow for upto 1.8 Gb of stuff on a single CD and quick bootup respectively.

*Next is the installer. It should be GUI installer with an icon on the desktop of the LiveCD (ubuntu fashion). I know many folks simply want a console mode installer, but many others simply prefer a GUI. here again BeleniX has it's own installer, and a few BOSUGians have taken up the initiative to use PerlTK to modify the current installer to a GUI. With Gparted now available on OpenSolairs (and the latest release of BeleniX), it makes resizing of partitions, modifying the partition table and VTOC easy. Parted again was ported by folks in Bosug. I dont know what the status of the 'Caiman' project is, but if it anything close to release 1, this can be the way to go.

*Next is the desktop flavor. Indiana is headed towards being _the_ opensolaris distribution (or that is what I understand from the discussions). A good method to follow here would be the Ubuntu style separate installations for Gnome, KDE (and if possible Xfce). All three have been known to compile and work fine under OS. BeleniX by default contains KDE and Xfce, and the next DVD release will contain Gnome. Compiz should be added by default as it is stable enough to be part of the distro.

*Port Ubuntu's settings importer (from Windows). This should make the transition very easy.

*Get as much device driver support for monitors as possible. I run into problems much more regularly than care about when X doesnt come up. I understand that the device driver condition is improving at a slow rate and there's nothing much to do other than biding time, but atleast this one factor should be looked into. Getting folks to work on an OS is much better than not by losing out due X not recognizing the video card.

*I'm sure with Ian on board, everyone's expecting apt-get. Well we already have Blastwave and pkg-get for Solaris right now. But I dont like the /opt/csw/ method. Somehow pulling stuff that already in there does not make sense for a new distribution. A package management system need to be setup (and a GUI along with it would be great) that uses a repository to install to /usr. This perhaps could be hosted on the Blastwave servers along with their current array of packages. Folks from Bosug are working on one such system that will also allow rollbacks.

These are need-to-be-done-stuff. Now coming to what would be nice to add.

*Get xgl working, so non-Nvidia folks can have a little 3D fun!

*Change that text bootup. This really is a pet peeve of mine, I Dont want to know that rtls0 has been down and up and if c0d0s0 is logging. At the vey last escape from the 80x25 and put all of these stuff in a drop down console box, that interested users can pull down to see what's going on.

*Add Ubuntu like 1-click codec downloader for media formats not bundled.

*Sun Studio 12 IDE bundled in. Seriously, looks like one of the best C IDEs out right now. This should help in picking OpenSolaris up in educational institutions.

*USBDump on the CD, so you can carry the distro around in your USB :) (I'm working on using encryption here using Xlofi, more on this in a later post.)

*First release before 2008!

Looks like this is the first wishlist out for Indiana, so I'd like so to see most implemented. Will update later if I have stuff to add on.