[OpenIndiana-discuss] Help with website

[Gregory Youngblood]

On Oct 10, 2011, at 5:42 PM, Christopher Chan wrote:

> On Tuesday, October 11, 2011 08:32 AM, Dan Swartzendruber wrote:
>> 
>> Quite true.  At this point, though, the admin space is the issue.
> 
> I come from a Linux background with my experience being done on Redhat Linux, Fedora, Centos and Ubuntu. I have also worked on FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I do not see a problem in the admin space. You can get various GNU tools on OpenIndiana. 

And it's been that way for a very long time. I remember one of my early tasks was to get gnu tools on solaris (2.4? 2.5?) server where it was then nfs exported to all the other servers and available somewhere like /usr/local (maybe it was /usr/local/gnu?). This was right as it was released and sunfreeware didn't yet have all the stuff readily available for download. I believe this was 97 or 98 time frame.

I ended building packages for just about all the gnu (and several non-gnu, but common) tools so they were proper solaris "packages" to boot. The end result, all of our servers had the gnu tools. Which were default depended on your path. 

I think the perceived problem in the admin space depends on the depth of experience of the admin too. Admins that only know one (or maybe, MAYBE 2) linux distribution(s) become so entrenched in their distro of choice they have a hard time seeing any other options (including other Linux options). The more well rounded admins don't have such a problem.

I can tell you of one friend that is a well rounded Linux guy and his impression of OpenSolaris and OpenIndiana: Linux in 95. His personal beef was with the extremely limited hardware support. He spent quite a bit of time trying to get just the right sata card and chipset and still had problems with getting things working that he finally gave up. This was less than a year ago too.

The biggest issues with getting Linux or others to check out and use OI isn't email vs. forums, gnu or not user space tools, etc., it's driver support and documentation, and often the attitude they seem to frequently get when they come looking for help.

Greg