[OpenIndiana-discuss] Replacing Solaris 10 u8

[Tim Mooney]

In regard to: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Replacing Solaris 10 u8, Reginald...:

> My Solaris 10 u8 instance is rather dated.  I'd like to update it, but
> there are some absolute requirements:
>
> Sun/Forte/Oracle Developer Studio

Older versions of Studio worked on OI.  I built a lot of software on 
oi151a9 and early hipster using Studio.

However, as Solaris 11.x and the Illumos distros have slowly diverged,
versions of Studio in the past 2-3 years have become less compatible with
Illumos distros.  I don't remember the first Studio version where I
noticed significant breakage, but it was either 12.4 or 12.5Beta.  I was
able to get around the issue using LD_PRELOAD and some shim code for
things that parts of Studio wanted that OI did not provide, but at that
point it felt like the writing was probably on the wall.  hipster adopted
gcc for a reason; it was clear that eventually the two codebases were
going to diverge enough that Studio likely wasn't going to work reliably on
Illumos.

An extremely determined person might be able to use preloading and other
tricks to continue to get more recent Studio to work on OI, but every
Studio release will likely bring new challenges.

That's without considering any potential licensing issues.

> twm window manager on at least one screen
> ZFS filesystem

ZFS is well-handled by Illumos, and therefore by OI.

oi-userland has a component for twm.  twm is probably my least favorite
window manager ever, so I have no idea if there are any issues with it.
Even if there are, the framework for packaging it is in place, just
waiting for a twm-fan to contribute any fixes to make twm work gloriously
on OI.

> must be stable long term

Without a rigorous and probably lengthy definition, it's hard to know
what meets that goal.  Perhaps for you, it means you pick a collection of
packages that work reliably for your use cases, and then you just don't
ever update your system.  If you're off-network, as you've eluded to
elsewhere, maybe security updates aren't something you need.
>
> If needed I'll consider creating and supporting an LTS branch of Hipster.

That would be a huge undertaking.  My guess is it would be a lot less work
to start with a distro that does stable releases and then add the bits you
need that are missing.

Tim
-- 
Tim Mooney                                             Tim.Mooney at ndsu.edu
Enterprise Computing & Infrastructure /
Division of Information Technology    /                701-231-1076 (Voice)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164