Bill Sommerfeld's Weblog

Thursday November 01, 2007

Looking good, save for the name.

Ran into a few bugs installing the Indiana prototype.  

1) the installer got confused when I attempted to add the user "sommerfeld".  (a 8-character username limit is a figment of useradd's imagination).    I had to reboot and try again. 

 2) the lack of the nvidia binary driver in the distribution meant that it didn't cope with a 1920x1200 display.

but otherwise it installed with a zfs root in almost no time flat from CD (system refused to boot from a USB key).

It still needs a name change, though..

Premature naming.

So, a preview of the new packaging & install technology produced by Project Indiana was just released. I'm shortly going to be installing it on a spare system in my office just to give it a shot.

Unfortunately, it's being called the "OpenSolaris Developer Preview" and is being portrayed as a distinctly special binary distribution on the opensolaris home page. The name is unfortunate for a number of reasons:

1. The vast majority of the changes have not yet received the typical design and architecture review received by Solaris components
2. There is not yet community consensus that OpenSolaris should have a reference binary distribution
3. There is certainly not yet consensus that the Indiana technology is the right tool for the job.

I hope the folks who chose this name despite ample warning that it would cause trouble quickly reconsider. And I hope that the poor choice of name doesn't deter people from giving it a try. But the choice of names is forcing something of a constitutional crisis within opensolaris.