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

[Atiq Rahman]

> I presume setting up a new system will take several days. Several weeks
was a bit much.
I can relate to that.

And, I will say, we need to move things fast in OI, open things up for the
new generation, so new folks feel comfortable to try OI. Then, they will
gladly check out OI, test various things on it, develop on it and some of
them will eventually be contributors. That would mean current stakeholder
folks who are holding control will feel uncomfortable at times, due to fast
moves, and to adapt to new ways of thinking. But, this is the only way to
survive and to make progress.

Making the installer friendly and easy is the entry point to Christmast for
illumos members. That includes updating the OI website. I had events with
folks in the Bay Area. They could not find the images to install OI easily.
Literally, I had to guide em in every step. They were not feeling as
comfortable as trying other operating systems out there!

Opening the heavenly gate of github issues for both illumos-gate and OI
would be next level. To make OI more friendly to devs we need to get
chromium back to the platform that will open VS Code, AI coding and many
other possibilities. Enable/open the issues on github and see how many bug
reports keep coming! Maybe it's not as stable as you think.

Best,

Atiq


On Sun, Aug 17, 2025 at 7:32 AM Reginald Beardsley via openindiana-discuss <
openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org> wrote:

>  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]
> _______________________________________________
> openindiana-discuss mailing list
> openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org
> https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
>