[OpenIndiana-discuss] OI-hipster-gui-20210405.iso and OVirt/QEMU status report

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

This report follows earlier ones under the subject "The kiss of death"
that supplied installation reports for virt-manager/QEMU on CentOS 7
and Ubuntu 20.04, and VirtualBox on another Ubuntu 20.04 system.  This
one is fairly positive, so I felt it deserved a new subject line.

Today, I successfully installed OpenIndiana Hipster from

	http://dlc.openindiana.org/isos/hipster/test/OI-hipster-gui-20210405.iso

on OVirt/QEMU running on CentOS Linux release 7.6.1810 (Core).

As I noted in an earlier report, this virtualization system has the
advantage of live VM migration, at a cost of considerably more complex
VM creation and management.  However, once a VM has been successfully
installed, the platform has been rock solid, and we routinely use the
VM migration feature to move VMs off one server to another, run system
updates on the first, reboot, and move back its VMs, without the VMs
even noticing their two moves.

I took both OVirt snapshots and ZFS snapshots during the installation
steps, with multiple reboots, and have now successfully copied over
/var/opt, /opt/csw, and $prefix/texlive/2021 trees from other systems.

No boot problems have been observed this time.

However, there are a few other problems with OpenIndiana Hipster on
OVirt:

(1) Ovirt offers three console types: QXL (default), VGA, and CIRRUS.

    With QXL, the GUI desktop is too high to fit on the screen. Moving
    the mouse near the bottom edge slides up the display to make the
    bottom task bar visible.  Moving the mouse near the top edge makes
    the top menu bar only partly visible.  However, in neither case
    can the mouse select icons.  

    I shut down the system, changed to VGA, and found the same
    behavior as with QXL.

    I again shut down the system, changed to CIRRUS, rebooted, logged
    in, and now the screen is fully visible, but the mouse cannot
    select actions from the menu bar or tool bar.  Curiously, moving
    the mouse over a toolbar item, such as the network icon, produces
    a yellow popup window that describes the button.  One just cannot
    select it.

    With all three video types, there are generally two mouse cursors
    on the screen, but with CIRRUS, they remain within 5mm of each
    other.

    Those mouse problems make the desktop almost unusable.  With the
    mouse in the central region of the screen, I can get a popup menu
    from which I can start a terminal.  However, the Applications /
    Places / System / Network / ... menu bar items are unusable.

    Unlike VirtManager and VirtualBox, which have menu buttons to send
    Ctl-Alt-Fn and Ctl-Alt-DELete input to the VM, the OVirt button
    can only send Ctl-Alt-DELete, so there is no way to select
    alternate consoles that are supported by most operating systems.

    With another VM installed on virt-manager/QEMU on Ubuntu 20.04,
    there were no such icon selection problems, and I was able to
    reconfigure that system for static IPv4 addressing.

    If someone knows what program is started by clicking on the
    network menubar icon, please report it; I've never had much
    success with manual changes to files in the /etc/ tree on Solaris
    family systems to switch between DHCP-assigned and static IP
    addresses.

(2) During the installation, I selected Denver, CO, USA, from the
    world map, and it definitely showed that choice in the text bar
    under the map.  However, when the system rebooted, the timezone
    was still UTC, the clock was off by hours, and /etc/localtime did
    not exist.  The OVirt control panel shows the clock should be a
    hardware clock set to "(GMT-00:00) GMT Standard Time".  I fixed
    that problem by

	# ln -s /usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/America/Denver /etc/localtime
	# ntpdate time1.google.com

After fixing those issues, creating users accounts (more snapshots), I
ran

	# pkg install build-essential
	# pkg update
	# sync
	# sync
	# poweroff

I made another OVirt snapshot, powered on, and the system is now ready
for use.

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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