An economic analyst vs Microsoft Windows Vista

Thursday Apr 19, 2007

Lets face it, most operating system installers aren't fun. If Microsoft Windows weren't pre-installed on more than 90% of desktop PCs, I suspect more than a few PCs would be sitting at BIOS boot prompts. But if the experience of my favorite blogging economist is any indication, even when you have a monopoly and your OS is pre-installed on 90% of new PCs, you can still screw up the initial user experience. Michael Shedlock is a economic analyst with an interesting view on everything from global property bubbles to currency carry trades to the goofy and dangerous actions of the Federal Reserve board. But give him a new laptop with Windows Vista pre-installed and pretty soon there's blood on the floor (literally!)

One of my pet peeves about the old Solaris installer is that the Java GUI installer takes more memory than the minimal requirements of the installed operating system. The same can be said for most GNU/Linux installers I've dealt with and probably Microsoft Windows installers also. I once tried installing Windows 98 on an old box and left the CD churn overnight. When I woke up it had burnt out the CDROM drive.

Fortunately OpenSolaris installers are improving and targeting smaller machines. But until an OpenSolaris distribution is pre-installed on your average Wal-Mart laptop, you'll probably need to read some docs and blogs on openSolaris.org. Here are some notes from an install on a low-end machine:

Don't use graphical install!

To check the md5sum of a downloaded package or ISO on OpenSolaris:
digest -a md5 {filename}

To see if any errors occurred during install:
cat /var/sadm/install_data/install_log | grep -i error

To see a verbose list of the devices on your system:
prtconf -v

Like this post? | | | |

Posted at 04:52PM Apr 19, 2007 by bnitz in OpenSolaris
Tags: install installation microsoft opensolaris solaris vista windows