[OpenIndiana-discuss] Sparc

[Andreas Wacknitz]

Am 06.09.2014 um 20:03 schrieb Dormition Skete (Hotmail) <dormitionskete at hotmail.com>:

> Ok, since no one else wants to bite, I guess I will.  
> 
> I haven’t spoken with Martin or spent any significant time watching his distro for a while now, so this information may not be entirely up to date; but it’s highly unlikely that things have changed significantly in recent months.
> 
> A couple of years ago, Martin quit his job (sort of) and embarked upon making openSXCE.  It was a one-man effort, requiring extreme self-sacrifice.  His announcement of the distro ruffled quite a few feathers in multiple communities, and in the months following he seems to have been shunned and maligned by the Illumos community, the OpenIndiana community (to some extent), and probably a few others.  
> 
> Because of that, he shifted openSXCE away from Illumos to a derivative of it (?) called Dillix (sp ?).  I’m not sure how significant that is.  He’s not the only one to have had problems with Illumos.  Look at the website for Schillix, and
As far as I remember it was DilOS (www.dilos.org). If you look at the IRC channel of it (#dilos) you can see that there are SPARC packages being build but no downloadable ISO so far (x86 only yet).
DilOS is an Illumos based distribution that uses the Debian package management system.
OpenSXCE uses the old SysV package management system. As far as I understand with some enhancements (like pkgutil from OpenCSW).

As I see the situation, Martin is frustrated because of several things. First, he gets only very few money for his work on OpenSXCE. Alas there is no real community around OpenSXCE evolving.
Second, Illumos is mostly driven by some folks working for companies that use Illumos for their own distributions which are all x86 server oriented. On top of that there is a controversy about the package management system. So this is also frustrating for him. Probably he would add some more to this list.

So, there is no special interest in SPARC or desktop left. My impression is that people interested in it are getting fewer and fewer.


> you’ll see they had problems with Illumos, too.
> 
> His May 2014 release was the first for the past year.  I think he initially wanted to release updates monthly, but that has not materialized yet.  (It’s a lot of work.)
> 
The OpenSXCE is an amazing work of a single person. Alas it has some rough edges on my Blade 2000. Eg. I needed to install some missing packages (bind) to get networking work. And at the moment
gdm is not starting correctly because something is changing the access to /tmp during boot. When I correct it (chmod 1777 /tmp) I can successfully restart gdm.

I am using OpenIndiana Hipster successfully since it arrived on my Ultra 25. For me it makes a nice Workstation OS as I was able to build my preferred programming environments
(Pharo Smalltalk (http://pharo.org; alas FFI not yet working), Racket (http://racket-lang.org) and Clojure (http://clojure.org)).
On my Blade 2000 I was able to build and install Racket (some OpenCSW packages were needed) and Clojure.
Clojure was relatively simple, after the /tmp fix leiningen installed Clojure bravely.


Regards,
Andreas