[oi-dev] State of development

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-04-18 12:05, Hans-Peter Carpenter wrote:
> Just thought FreeBSD stole "our" DTRACE and ZFS, let's steal their
> drivers ;-)

That's not stealing. The explicit licensing of both projects allows
such borrowing of code to the benefits of collaboration, as well as
adding extra eyeballs to review code and overall design (there are
is number of wrinkles in ZFS found by porters to BSD and Linux for
example).

> 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?

I believe, we will thank you, publicly or in our minds ;)

>
> 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 ;-)
>
> 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.

Well... when you put it this way, I agree.

When I don my "developer hat", I'd prefer to be eating my own dogfood.
It is also cool to show it off during common meetings with adepts of
other OSes, i.e. during conferences or trainings, and it's uncool to
have the system unable to use networking at such events ;)

So, while full-blown desktop support with 3D acceleration and effects
might be over the top if I am ready to limit myself to IDEs, browsers,
terminal windows and other primarily text interfaces, the basic things
that allow connectivity (wifi and usb3 for example, just working, even
if not optimal and top-notch performant) and power management are still
quite a must.

//Jim