[oi-dev] [discuss] Making OI friendly to new users

[Joshua M. Clulow]

On Tue, 12 Aug 2025 at 14:48, Atiq Rahman <atiqcx at gmail.com> wrote:
> Many common Ethernet/LAN drivers are absent.
> Common wireless drivers are also missing.
> Graphics drivers are broken or nonexistent for much of today’s and yesterday's hardware.

FWIW, these are all issues for illumos as a whole, rather than
specifically OpenIndiana.  I agree that they are important issues to
tackle!

> I’d be happy to help test or provide feedback on any efforts aimed at improving these.

The thing is, providing feedback or offering to test things is not
really what we need.  We need people willing to actually write the
drivers, and to do work on the graphics subsystems (updating the port
of DRM from Linux, in particular).

You may say "ah, but I am not a kernel developer, I can not do those
things"!  But the kernel is just a big C program, and everybody who is
comfortable working on it now started out from a point where they were
not yet able to do that.

If you want to see progress, pick an issue and work on it.  Other
folks in the community can provide advice and help you if you get
stuck!  Otherwise, things will continue largely as they have.


Cheers.

-- 
Joshua M. Clulow
http://blog.sysmgr.org