[OpenIndiana-discuss] OpenIndiana (or others) and Dell E6320 - Sandybridge

[Kimmo Jaskari]

On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 00:43, Ned Lewis <nl at nedlewis.org> wrote:
> After I started reading about illumos and OI, I thought it would be good to
> try again.   I think these projects have a lot of potential, and I'd love to
> see them succeed, so maybe I can help out in some small way.  I figured as a
> first step, I'd install on a simple laptop and spend time trying to get the

This shouldn't be seen as a specific complaint against anyone or
against OI and I for one appreciate all the hard work the people
developing OI and Illumos do, just ruminating a little on life with OI
as a non-developer.

Unfortunately right now out here on the cutting edge, I find it is
either heaven or hell. ZFS works brilliantly and the core OS is rock
solid...but something as seemingly simple as getting Samba to work
defeated me, and that's the samba that was in the repository. I gave
up after two days and used SMB CIFS. Granted, the latter is probably
the better way to begin with but it irks me to fail. For my purposes
Samba would have been easier. If it hadn't been so much harder. :)

Then I started trying to get Squeezebox Server to work (it's a really
great way to stream music both to Squeezebox hardware and shoutcast
clients, just a very nice open source app to serve Logitech's hardware
that they bought off Slim Devices). It's generic Perl with some
plugins and I still bounced off that one. Granted the problem was that
the software needs specific aging versions of specific plugins and I
installed the latest; haven't given up on that yet and plan to clone a
zone for that and try again but still - even the build method and
script they have available for more esoteric operating systems throws
up its hands immediately when it sees "SunOS". There are no ready-made
install scripts and the like for anything like that for OI as a rule,
so you wind up doing a lot of manual work.

Today I wanted to install a bittorrent client. 1.93 of Transmission is
in the repository, but the current is 2.33, so back to the compiling
we go. There, I was temporarily stymied by libevent in the repository
being 1.3 or some such - either way, it was below the version 2.0 or
higher that Transmission wanted. Thankfully that at least compiled
easy and I installed that manually too and then Transmission compiled
too with some warnings.

But that's sort of how it is - if it's in the repository and someone
else has done the heavy lifting, you're usually good to go if you have
the hardware to support the OS. If it's not in the repository or it is
moldering and ancient and you want the new version, you wind up doing
a lot of heavy lifting.

I also looked at Deluge as an option for Bittorrent, but gave up on
that immmediately when I saw the prerequisites list. Had I been on any
Linux I could have just grabbed a package, of course, but even to
compile from source would have been facilitated by grabbing the
following line they graciously provide in the "how to compile"
section:

sudo apt-get install python python-twisted python-twisted-web2
python-openssl python-simplejson python-setuptools gettext intltool
python-xdg python-chardet python-geoip python-libtorrent python-notify
python-pygame python-gtk2 python-gtk2-dev librsvg2-dev xdg-utils
python-mako

I haven't looked at how much of that is in OI or how much pain it
would have caused to get it there, but bottom line is that there would
have been pain, either more or less of it.

I'm a big Solaris fan (certified on it, even), was instrumental in
getting Nexenta used as a storage solution at work quite recently and
obviously I like OpenIndiana too since I'm using it actively in spite
of all these niggles, but... if there was such a thing as Linux with a
proper ZFS implementation I probably would jump ship for a home server
environment. Just because it would be so much easier to be a little
more mainstream. I don't like working this hard in my spare time, it
gets so that you go to work and relax after a long weekend. :-D

-- 
-{ Kimmo Jaskari }--{ kimmo.jaskari at gmail.com }--

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go
away." -- Philip K. Dick