[OpenIndiana-discuss] [developer] Preliminary Download link: Illumos based MartUX_OpenIndiana_Edition for SPARC LiveDVD (without installer)

[David Halko]

Good Day Martin!

Some of us spent this evening working with your LiveDVD on a V120 with 4
Gig RAM.
- it takes about 48 minutes to boot
- we have no video display, so we use the serial console
- we figured out how to bring up ethernet interface with DHCP and an
external VNC console
- we like the nice selection of apps that were included on the desktop
- we accessed your OI-SPARC via VNC from a SunRay client hosted on a
Solaris 10 V240 - very reliable
- we will need to update scripts on the iso, to make it more useful as a
live-dvd server environment

This being said, this looks good enough to move forward with! Very
professional!

As far as an installer, Caiman is not required. With your direction, a
basic installer could be made using existing infrastructure (I see dtksh is
bundled, meaning X, CLI, and HTTP are all reasonable... I did not look for
fmli yet... a solid bug-free scripting frameworks with small footprint is
desirable.) Maybe even gdm/xdm on boot for console-less & serial-less
installs. We may be able to assist here, with your guidance.

I am wondering whether zfsdiff with snapshots may be helpful for release
management and automatic package creation. SVR4 class-action scripts could
provide for compression support. Sparse SVR4 packages could be made for
upgrades. Packages could automatically be made available over HTTP to
pkgadd -x option for a wanboot mini-root. Later, pkgadd could install
against a ZFS alternate boot environment. Perhaps zfssend from a build
environment, named by release. There is no reason this could/should not be
100% automated. Once again, we could help here.

Have you thought about a network boot from OpenBoot, maybe mounting some
NFS network drives from a Solaris 10 platform (until OI-SPARC is stable
enough to self-host)? We have some other V100's and V120's... This could
make a very nice release management environment (zfs snapshot, boot first
box, validate, package; zfs snapshot, boot second box, validate, package;
keep a few boxes always live) We would be willing to work on that, if we
could get a little guidance.

I realize everything I said above is very brief, may not be 100%
technically accurate, but I think you can see that I am excited, and there
are others ready to dig-in and bring this forward. For storage, test
systems, scripting, and automation - we can find some resources. We don't
do C, nor do we do pretty, but we do functional.

Thanks - David Halko
http://svr4.blogspot.com/
http://netmgt.blogspot.com/


On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 11:19 AM, Martin Bochnig <martin at martux.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 8:38 AM, DavidHalko <davidhalko at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > U da man! I will be looking into testing it tomorrow on some machines.
> Thank you for your efforts!
> >
> > Honestly, I see no value of IPS under OI SPARC since I do not expect any
> software will ever be commercial software made available for IPS under
> SPARC OI since it is so buggy & a moving target.
> >
> > There is plenty of SVR4 Solaris 10 SPARC commercial software currently
> available. SVR4 packaging is also extensible without code changes. We also
> don't need to do pre/post install/remove scripts, if we choose not to in
> SVR4 packaging.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > David Halko
> > http://svr4.blogspot.com/
> > http://netmgt.blogspot.com/
>
> Hi David!
>
> many thanks for your nice comments and +1  :)
> I'm glad to get such feedback.
>
> However, it is still only a LiveDVD and only pre-Alpha stuff.
> No installer yet (and Caiman gui-install and textinstall crash early
> during, it would be a very long story to tell)   ...
>
> As for IPS I could not agree more with you.
> The question is and remains, if we necessarily ___need__ IPS for anything.
> From a user-only's point of view it is already bad enough.
> From a distribution-builder's view I would not even wish my worst
> enemy to experience it (ghhrr!!!).
>
> Here only one current example: A user's T2000 runs pkg for 8 hours,
> then crashes. To do a thing that would not even be necessary in the
> first place in such a scenario, with SVR4-pkgadd! And this is how ugly
> it is from a user's point of things. Then you do not want to imagine,
> how one feels as a distribution-constructor!!
> A year is nothing while fighting with IPS  ...
>
> See the thread "pkg-discuss] gcc install?" under:
>
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/pkg-discuss/2012-October/thread.html
>
> p.s. I added your SVR4 link to my footer ...
>
> tnx && rgds,
>
> %martin
> http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/MartUX_OpenIndiana+oi_151a+SPARC+LiveDVD
>   http://www.youtube.com/user/MartUXopensolaris
>     http://www.facebook.com/pages/MartUX_SPARC-OpenIndiana/357912020962940
>       https://twitter.com/MartinBochnig
>         http://www.martux.org (new page not yet online, but pretty soon)
>
> Forwarding David Halko's: http://svr4.blogspot.com/
>