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

[Reginald Beardsley]

 The number one rule of distributing software is test everything you can to be sure it actually works and don't ship things that are known not to work. 

I installed FreeBSD 12.2 without issues. But when I went to /usr/ports to build X11 it failed part way through the build because "xmlto" was missing and one of the many auto**** pieces was misconfigured. However, at least it was not using imake.

As I have ordered the latest BSD book by McKusic et al I shall investigate fixing X11 after I read the book and compare FreeBSD to Solaris as documented in the 2nd ed of the Internals book.

Even with Sun/Oracle behind it, Solaris could not and can not compete with Linux. The Linux market is large enough that the leading HW OEMs make certain that their HW is supported. That costs a lot of money in the x86 world. Far more than anyone could afford other than the HW OEM. Neither *BSD nor Solaris/Illumos/OI are large enough markets to make it economical for the HW OEMs to support them.

The best we can do is target older top tier HW from IBM and HP and leverage their Linux support to support Illumos/OI. A 24 core, 512 GB RAM HP Z820 can be had for less than I paid for my Ultra 20 in 2006. It's a staggering piece of HW and is Oracle certified for Solaris with IIRC a caveat about the sound chip which is not very important on such a machine.

Better to do some things well, than everything badly.

Have Fun!
Reg