[OpenIndiana-discuss] An installation report and a few questions from a Solaris neophyte.

[Lazarus Long]

 Greetings,

First off, thanks for making OI.

I have successfully installed Hipster 18.04 on my home serve, a Xeon D-1520
with 32GB RAM, 4x1TB HDD in raidz and dual 1Gb Intel NICs (It's an ASROCK
D1520D4I motherboard, just for the record).  I also have an Nvidia
GTX750-ti card in the PCI-e slot.  The only hardware in the system that
doesn't have a working driver is the Intel Management Engine.  Since this
is a home server, I never use it anyway.  In order to install the operating
system I had use the text installer via the LiveUSB image because the
TextInstaller image flooded the console with kernel messages like these:

in.ndpd[574]: [ID 302683 daemon.error] incoming_ra: SIOCSLIFLNKINFO
(interface igb0): Invalid argument
in.ndpd[574]: [ID 102006 daemon.error] prefix_update_k(igb0, igb0:6, ::/64)
from  to ONLINK  name is already allocated

This meant that the text installer was scrolling off the screen faster than
I could read and respond to it.  Having to download the installer twice was
a minor thing for my part, but might mean that the project is spending more
on bandwidth than it needs to so I thought I should bring it up.  I had
read a bit before trying the install and I knew that I wouldn't be able to
install OI onto striped mirrors (raid10) like *BSD so I chose raidz
instead.  I had to reboot and restart the the installation once because I
had created the zpool manually, but when I tried to install to an existing
zpool the installer didn't prompt me to create a user account.  I can see
the logic behind this if one is upgrading or recovering an existing
system.  Anyway, the text installer had trouble overwriting the zfs info I
had added to my disks and when I rebooted the OI bootloader couldn't mount
the zpool.  Knowing that this was above my pay grade I just installed again.

After the install:

The MATE desktop looks and acts almost just like Linux.  There were a few
cosmetic glitches when changing themes, but logging out and back in
resolved them.

The messages from ndp are still coming fast and furious but I am closer to
finding out how to disable them.  I am currently reading about man pages
about service management and trying to do my homework before I make any
changes.

The sshd daemon works great out the box and I was able to return my server
to it's normal headless state.  So now a few questions:

Is there a preferred VNC server I should install or will ssh be "good
enough" for remote administration of the system?

When I do 'pkg search libvirt' and 'pkg search virt-manager' I can see:

pkg.fmri   set    openindiana.org/system/library/libvirt
pkg:/system/library/libvirt at 0.5.11-2015.0.2.0

and

pkg.fmri   set    openindiana.org/desktop/virt-manager
pkg:/desktop/virt-manager at 0.6.1-2015.0.2.0

However I think that these are pkg categories since I can't install them.
Are there other packages I should be searching for in order to get libvirt
up and running for remote KVM management or will I have to do everything
via command line?

Thanks for reading this and have great day!

Marc Roberts