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OpenSolaris ISO's for build 95

Thursday Aug 14, 2008

We've just pushed the repository update and ISO's  for build 95, see the announcement. As with build 93, the ISO's are available via torrent, though I'd expect genunix and others to mirror shortly for those using non-P2P download technologies. Note that there's one issue with the ISO's mentioned in the release notes, which is that svc.configd complains about being unable to backup the SMF repository; that's bug 2824.

I'd also like to mention a discussion that I started late last week on about how to put the primary languages ISO on a diet, which I'd foreshadowed in my post about build 93. The ISO needs to lose about 70 MB by the time we release 2008.11. If you've got something to contribute to the discussion, feel free to join in, though I'd appreciate some reasoning or, even better, competitive analysis along with any suggestions you make.

[8] Comments
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Posted at 11:55AM Aug 14, 2008 by dminer in OpenSolaris_Installation
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Hi,

yea. Make it into a DVD already.
* No computer without a DVD drive these days could even run OpenSolaris with ZFS root (too much RAM for such a old box).
* OpenOffice should be shipped on disc like Ubuntu and Fedora both do.
* As long as its below 1GB ISO its fine.
* If you did not have the BW to download more then 600MB of ISO then how could you use IPS to download the rest of the *stuff* you would need to make a useful system?

Case in point,
Regards,
Edward.

Posted by EdwardOCallaghan on August 14, 2008 at 02:47 PM EDT #

That good news, as snv_95 includes the fix
that gives support for ATAPI devices, like CD & DVD drives,
when using the nv_sata driver. (nVidia CK804 & MCP55 chipsets)
http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6595488
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/onnv-notify/2008-July/014591.html
Which is very useful if you are trying to boot a live CD!
http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=61899

Posted by Nigel Smith on August 14, 2008 at 06:36 PM EDT #

@Edward

Your points have been considered in the past, but switching to a DVD format is not an option that's on the table presently, for competitive reasons: the distro's we're compared against are all still supplying live CD's. Believe it or not, a lot of people don't have DVD burners, even on recent systems.

BTW, Fedora does not include OpenOffice on their live CD, though they do include Abiword and Gnumeric. You're correct that Ubuntu does, however. If we could strip enough other stuff we'd certainly prioritize adding it, but that's not looking likely.

Posted by Dave Miner on August 15, 2008 at 09:44 AM EDT #

what do you think about a second CD, with openoffice netbeans etc?

Posted by sartek on August 15, 2008 at 12:24 PM EDT #

@sartek:

The problem there is what would you be placing there - a package repository? Right now, running an IPS repo from a read-only hsfs is fairly painful, according to a couple of people who have tried it.

More media variants is something I expect we'll do at some point (including a DVD) but right now we need to complete the distro constructor, which will give us the ability to create those variants easily, and the automated installer project, which will allow us to do scale our testing via automation, and thus support more variants. Right now there just isn't enough test capacity to do a different media set.

Posted by Dave Miner on August 15, 2008 at 12:37 PM EDT #

Tried twice to do image-update from b93. Both failed.

Looks like the best way is to install from a DVD. So far it works quite nicely. Pretty snappy, too.

Still have problems reading pdf files published by the documentation team. (Should use StarOffice to publish those docs, but who's listening? :-) )

Posted by W. Wayne Liauh on August 17, 2008 at 02:13 AM EDT #

Are there plans or discussion to incorporate the latest ZFS Boot from Nevada into OpenSolaris 2008.11? Specifically, this would include:
1. Allowing the option to mirror the rpool during install, along with automatic install of GRUB to second drive.
2. Allocate swap and dump from rpool, instead of fixed size swap in a separate slice.
3. Use real ZFS mounts, instead of legacy mounts.

I would be very interested.

Posted by Mark on August 18, 2008 at 10:44 AM EDT #

@Wayne: Please report the update failures to indiana-discuss or pkg-discuss (or file bugs in defect.opensolaris.org). The PDF issue is with the freetype fonts, I expect that build 96 will fix this. If you'd like soffice docs, I'd suggest raising that with the docs community. The problem I observe is that PDF viewers are a lot smaller and more widespread than the openoffice programs, so PDF is a better format for the general case.

@Mark: #1 will be done eventually, but we're not currently working on it (someone with sufficient interest could add it, bring it up on caiman-discuss if you're interested). #2 and #3 are in the works, see bugs 2161 and 2725 on defect.opensolaris.org.

Posted by Dave Miner on August 18, 2008 at 10:57 AM EDT #

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