The Path to Sun Device Detection Tool (1)
Several years ago, I was doing Solaris OS hardware compatibility testing job. At that time, my team had access to many different kind of x86 systems: laptops, desktops, workstations and servers; Systems from Dell, IBM , HP, Sony, Toshiba, Acer etc. We install Solaris on them, test whether each hardware component works in Solaris OS. We did it so many times, finally we even can predict whether a new system is likely to install Solaris OS successfully just by reading its chipset information. We built a small database in our mind.
Then someone came up with the idea: could we develop a small software to help others do this? We sure all supports this proposal since we'd like to share our experience with others and help people do this kind of task easily. We then did the brain storm about the use case of this software. We all thought the perfect solution is to provide a web link, when user click this link, they can know whether their hardware is supported by Solaris. While how to achieve that, we don't know. Then what's the next best solution? If we can do it through a live CD, it seems also acceptable. User boot from this CD and get a report about whether their systems are supported, with all data on the hard disk unchanged. Then we decided to start with this CD solution. We make the live CD by customizing Solaris installation CD. When the first prototype is available, we know this solution works, we can do it. Just, the size of the CD is too big, more than 500M. It seems not reasonable to ask users download a 500M ISO file to achieve this small function.
Things got changed when Solaris 10 1/06 was available. The introduction of grub and miniroot in this Solaris release makes it more easy for customization. We can reduce the size of the live CD to about 50M now. That is more acceptable than before. We then released the 1.0 version of Solaris for x86 Installation Check Tool. More than 300 users tried this product during the first month of it's release.
