[OpenIndiana-discuss] [oi-dev] [discuss] Making OI friendly to new users

[Reginald Beardsley]

 I should like note that my battle with the installation process left me so dispirited that I didn't actually bring the system online and migrate onto it for over 2 years and was hobbling along on a Debian 10 system I built just to provide remote support to a friend. When Firefox started crashing constantly I finally started the move, though I still have a lot of files to move so I can permanently shutdown some of my systems.

In my case I was building out a Z840 with space for 4x 4 TB HDs. I wanted a RAIDZ2 rpool and a RAIDZ1 scratch pool. That meant i *HAD* to make 2 slices on each drive. At the time I had 30+ years of experience as a sys admin. 2-3 years of VMS on a mIcroVAX II "world box" followed by years of Unix workstations of many flavors. I presume setting up a new system will take several days. Several weeks was a bit much.

I've never lost a battle with a computer, but that ordeal left less than eager to fight them. Especially poorly conceived and maintained installers such as the current OI installer.

Why is "Install to existing partition" not given as a option in the installer? Desktop icons with no broken links is a huge FAIL. I know some have been fixed, but IIRC when I tried the current installer on a test system there were still icons with broken links. Fortunately, "pkg update" worked well. If it had not I might well have abandoned OI entirely and simply gone to S10_u8 in an air gapped environment.

Before an installation disk image is created "SOMEONE* needs to test it with a moderately complex configuration. Assume the user is a competent admin. There should be no missing pieces. Ideally several people should do it on different HW. I have several Z400s which are set up to allow me to swap disks. I keep all my old disks just for install testing. In the IDE drive case I have ~2 dozen old disks in trays, but am no longer running any IDE systems. With a 3 disk trayless SATA bay in a Z400 I can do reasonably complex setups. And I have a talent for breaking installers.

If I am given reasonable notice I should be able to do a test install or two of varying complexity each time a new LiveCD image is ready for release.

If someone at my skill level has a problem with the install process it is *badly* broken. The OI install process does not compare well to Debian or any other distro. Someone with 20 years of Linux experience is not likely to get a good impression of OI when they hit broken desktop icons.

Sadly, McNealy et al gave themselves such a lavish change of control packages that IBM backed out and Oracle bought Sun instead. Having built AIX to compete with SunOS IBM would not have abandoned it as Oracle has. Suffice to say early AIX was less than robust. Not sure about now as I've been far away from AIX for over 20 years. The reason Linux is now dominant in several use contexts is the billion dollars IBM committed to enhancements to Linux.


Have Fun!
Reg



On Friday, August 15, 2025 at 09:10:34 PM CDT, Atiq Rahman <atiqcx at gmail.com> wrote:


Hi Till,
Thanks for the reply.

> I am not aware on the non-CSM UEFI issue
For me, this has been an issue. At present, the OI installer does not
present an option to install in UEFI system without dedicating a whole disk
to it.

As a workaround, I am choosing *Install_to_ExistingPool* by pressing F5. If
you are following mailing lists you're probably seeing I am reinventing the
wheel: manually taking care of stuff the installer is not doing when that
option is chosen.

New users might not have that much energy to go through all that to add an
OS (or they might call it distro) to their portable device.

[snip]