[OpenIndiana-discuss] Parted on 2020.04 GUI LiveImage DVD: Huh???

[Reginald Beardsley]

 FYI I meant for this to go to the list, not just to Judah. Shipping a broken instance of gparted has resulted in my taking a hard look at FreeBSD as an alternative to OI. My first install attempt did not go on the disk as I intended, but that rarely happens ever with a new installer. I have very carefully thought out system designs and it usually takes a few tries to get the result I want. But FreeBSD 12.2 *did* use the entire 5 TB disk.

Shipping broken software is something I do not tolerate. After some 10 years supporting Seismic Unix, when some experimental tools I developed were shipped against my express request that they not go out, I stopped providing support.

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I used gparted from a stand alone disk based on Debian stretch (whatever version *that* is). I am very tired of "cute" names.

I created 3 partitions, 2 GB, 100 GB and 4.9 TB nominally.

Both of the installers on the 2020.04 OI LiveImage failed to see the partition table and said that only 2 TB was accessible. I'm absolutely agog.

"Say it ain't so, Joe! Say it ain't so!"

I've run SunOS on my personal machines for almost 30 years starting with 4.1.1 on a 3/60. The only gap was a few years when I ran Tru64 on an Alpha LX164 from Microway because it was 4x faster at floating point than any other platform and I was developing seismic imaging code. That system was replaced by an Ultra 20 with a 3 year Gold level support contract. And after that Sun was gone and it was "So Larry's".

I've been responsible for release management and implementation for several packages including a large and very messy collection of ISV packages which routinely made the other ISV packages inoperable. I repackaged the dozen or so into a 2 tape distribution which had to be installed by a novice Unix admin, though quite skilled at VMS. Despite my never having seen the system it was installed on, the package worked flawlessly. This is not rocket science.

You do *NOT* ship things that don't work!

While looking for books on ZFS I saw that Kirk McKusick had a book on FreeBSD of which I was not aware and I added it to my book order. Having read most of the other books on BSD by Kirk, I certainly wanted to read this one even if I didn't use FreeBSD. I'm long past my "read every OS book" stage, but Kirk is an excellent writer.

At present I am only running 4 different operating systems This afternoon's effort with OI was intended to eliminate Solaris 10 u8 from the list. I'm hoping that this is just a transient issue, but if not, u8 will remain and OI will go. I'm a scientific programmer, so the Sun/Forte dbx is *very* important. I've used as dozen or more debuggers and nothing else comes close. This was a huge frustration when I was forced to us ladebug on Tru64.

The fact that after going to the trouble of building OI when I wanted to fix the "format -e" SEGV issue
I did not get any guidance from the dev lists on how to make it bootable does not incline me towards optimism.

Flame off.
Reg




On Friday, February 26, 2021, 05:03:33 PM CST, Judah Richardson <judahrichardson at gmail.com> wrote:


Gparted on OI has been nonfunctional for a long time now. I'd suggest you use a live USB from Ubuntu (for example) instead.