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Friday June 01, 2007
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.
Posted by anilg [Solaris] ( June 01, 2007 08:30 PM ) Permalink | Comments[8]
Here's my Indiana Wish list:
1) Get VConsole up and running.
2) Get one of the biggest of Suns partners (AMD) to move his royal a**, and create real Solaris 3D accelerated drivers for the cards with AIGLX support. AIGLX has proven to be a proper method for 3D effects, XGL has proven to be a hack (running two X servers in order to get one with 3D effects is definitely a cheap, even if effective, hack.
3) Give us a bluetooth stack.
4) Make sure that #3 integrates with D-Bus, which in turn implies having D-Bus.
5) Use a simple, appreciated and good installer such as Anaconda. History proved that Anaconda can work with apt-get (see progeny).
6) If we get the wonderful Anaconda installer, let's also get RPM support. That makes sense, considering that some of the Solaris packages are actually generated from RPM spec files. RPM also works on Solaris out of the box. I know that there are a lot of apt-get fans out there, but RPM is not bad, neither by design nor by implementation. It's been misused from time to time, but that doesn't mean that it's BAD. Furthermore, comparing RPM with apt-get is wrong by nature, comparing YUM with apt-get, or comparing rpm with deb is OK.
7) Let's try and not do the only thing that I hate about debian: one single huge patch plus the sources. SRPMs have inside them every single patch for every single change. It's easier to track, easier when a patch goes upstream, easier to update to a new version. Here most RPM based distributions have-it right.
8) Let's create a hardware database for each major Solaris driver. In previous Solaris betas I've reported that the bge driver doesn't recognize some PCI IDs, even though it works after I edit the devices.list file (or whatever its name is), and the problem didn't get solved in that release.
9) Create a R/W ext3 driver for Solaris, and implement the Linux LVM2. Create the equivalent of the Linux Device-Mapper, in order for us mortals to use something like dmraid for our winRAID controllers from HighPoint, SIS, Promise, 3Ware, NVidia and others. This could also help a lot with Linux->Solaris migrations. ZFS is great, but a server that is already running Linux can't be easily migrated to Solaris overnight without that.
10) Why on earth is anyone suggesting a *TK based installer when the default Solaris desktop uses GTK? What's wrong with JavaGnome or PyGTK or PerlGTK or C or GTKmm?
11) Please, for heaven's sake let's get rid of /opt/sfw and /opt/csw and let's put everything in /usr or, as suggested in /usr/gnu for tricky packages. /opt is an evil place to put multiple packages. This is the same mistake that SuSE did, and they are correcting it now.
12) For the accelerated X drivers, let's try to make them kernel-level, including the frame-buffer. The reason for this is simple, MacOS does this and it makes the console potentially very friendly, including at boot-up. X11 should only be a thin layer above the kernel frame-buffer. This could allow a very friendly boot interface, and a very friendly console, and Linux hacks such as the Vesa driver for the console and another driver for X11 would be irrelevant.
13) Get a new release of Samba, with ZFS ACL and Quota support up into Solaris ASAP.
14) The GNOME Settings Tools can be a great starting point for simple administration tasks, let's use them and extend them. The SMF has no GTK based GUI. I am not very fond of opening a web page for some administration tasks (although it comes with some distinct advantages).
15) Let's also have an INotify style VFS add-on. Using anything userland for file notification is just plain wrong. Pooling over and over again is evil from a power management point of view (think laptops).
I am sure that there are many more, but this is what I came up with in 10 minutes.
Anyway, I am sure that OpenSolaris is off to a great start. I am using Solaris on 50% of my servers, the rest being Linux and I am doing quite well. The percent is still increasing in favor for Solaris.
All the best,
Razvan
Posted by Razvan Corneliu VILT on June 02, 2007 at 12:46 AM IST #
Posted by Anil on June 02, 2007 at 07:00 AM IST #
Posted by UX-admin on June 02, 2007 at 02:47 PM IST #
Posted by Anil on June 02, 2007 at 06:21 PM IST #
Posted by Alan Coopersmith on June 03, 2007 at 12:18 PM IST #
Posted by Dennis Clarke on June 04, 2007 at 11:29 PM IST #
Posted by Paul Gress on June 04, 2007 at 11:52 PM IST #
Posted by Ken Mays on June 20, 2007 at 06:58 PM IST #