[oi-dev] State of development

Thu Apr 18 10:05:37 UTC 2013

All,

Luca, I sort of agree ... ok, I am just some random tech writer (with 
some dev skills in KSH, Java) who likes Solaris and would love to 
contribute to this project. The problem I see is vision - we probably 
need to find a way to get a FreeBSD driver wrapper, akin to ndis - it 
does not sound that hard a thing to do to me, but I have absolutely no idea.

Just thought FreeBSD stole "our" DTRACE and ZFS, let's steal their 
drivers ;-)

We do need vision and a plan. I would be happy to update the website, I 
have done some tiny changes here and there, and I thought this project 
was dead, now I see a bunch of people who actually want this thing to 
roll, I am not alone? Coool! This mailing list has a life after all ... 
(except wifi driver compilation issues/porting).

I have a couple of weeks off of work soon, if I overhaul the wiki a bit, 
what will you do?

BTW, I have an HP Elitebook 8540W and I wanna put oi on this thing, 
however, it is my production lappy - so I needa be somewhat sure that it 
is more stable than Windows 7 was - I am running linux now :-\. Note: 
Windows 7 (with latest drivers) lost wifi connection every time I 
unplugged the power adapter, forcing a reboot ... yes, it is supposed to 
be a laptop ;-)

/Henry Ford/ - "/Obstacles/ are those frightful things you see when you 
take your eyes off your goals."

HP

On 04/17/2013 08:43 AM, Luca De Pandis wrote:
> I think the main problem of OI is not the lack of leadership or man power.
>
> I think the main problem is the focus of this distro.
> Making a desktop distribution without any support of recent hardware is a no-
> go, because nobody will be interested in a distro that doesn't support KMS or
> WiFi.
>
> Please, don't misunderstand me. Is not an OI fault.
> It's like a dog chasing its tail: No recent hardware -> No interest -> No man
> power -> No innovation -> No recent hardware...
>
> Illumos is an amazing platform and i really like OI.
> I would use it on my laptop, instead of Linux or BSD.
>
> But, the lack of recent hardware (Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge KMS, Wifi, Card
> Reader, Bluetooth etc.) holds me off to use it on my PC.
>
> For now, i use Slackware64 14.0 with ZFSonLinux kernel modules for my USB HD.
>
> IMHO Illumos will have a bright future on server market, but for now not on
> desktop.
>
> Indeed, SmartOS is a very advanced and used hypervisor operating system.
> And it doesn't suffer of the same problems of OI, because the desktop is not
> its focus.
>
> When Illumos will be grown, maybe a new Canonical with the desktop market in
> mind will make a new distribution and will bring innovation in the mainstream
> hardware area.
> But, for now, focusing on desktop market, there where the competitors are
> Linux, Windows and Mac OS X that have a large range of supported peripherals,
> without any support for recent hardware and without a company that spends
> money to make new drivers is a suicide, IMHO.
>
>
> Best regards,
> Luca De Pandis
>
>
>
> In data martedì 16 aprile 2013 18:29:28, Garrett D'Amore ha scritto:
>> I've tried to stay away from commenting on this thread, but….
>>
>> The problem with OI is lack of sufficient man power and leadership.   There
>> are other problems as well ("vision" is one I referred to in the past).
>>
>> But most urgently, to keep OI going, with any kind of cadence, it needs more
>> volunteers.  The comments below point to lack of a plan . What's even worse
>> than lack of a plan is lack of resources to *execute* a plan.  Release a
>> full desktop distribution is *non-trivial*, and the road is littered with
>> failed efforts due to insufficient resource, or lack of sufficient
>> motivation.  (Nexenta used to have a desktop distro… that's how they
>> started before they moved to storage -- the work/payoff ratio doing a
>> desktop simply doesn't pay.)
>>
>> I'm happy to report that illumos' future is no longer tied to OI's.  But I'd
>> still love to see more folks pitch in and help drive it.  As for myself, I
>> simply haven't the time to do so; illumos and my own commercial venture
>> (not to mention my family!) leave me little time for hobby work anymore.
>> :-)
>>
>> 	- Garrett
>>
>> On Apr 16, 2013, at 6:17 PM, Chris Jones c/o Unixmen
> <chrisjones at unixmen.com> wrote:
>>> As others have stated, a road-map outlining planned target dates for
>>> releases and updates is definately  needed and is what everyone wants to
>>> see. Otherwise, any project can seem stale and inactive.
>>>
>>> I have been a long time reader of this mailing list and contact people
>>> via email regularly and I know OpenIndiana is far from dead and
>>> inactive. But looking at the information and resources on offer on the
>>> web, there's not really anything useful that suggests what is going on
>>> with the project and where it is heading. And there also needs to be
>>> clear information about who is in charge of what in the community. Who
>>> is the Project Leader? Who is in charge of development and organization
>>> of such tasks? If it is all there in the dark alleys of the internet
>>> somewhere, it certainly isn't easy to find.
>>>
>>>
>>> Regards
>>>
>>> Chris Jones
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