[OpenIndiana-discuss] Desktop Painpoints

Wed Feb 5 13:41:18 UTC 2025

Hi Till,

srm/projects use case, you asked:)

I run courses on shell scripting for beginners at a university. I did
this with an old sunray environment on oracle solaris, which minimizes
the workload of setting up a course full of desktop systems.
For a change I setup a box with OI, netbooted some cheap thinclients with
NetBSD off the OI machine up to starting a local x-server and xdmcp
requesting a x-session from that same OI machine. thought a quarter terra
of ram and sufficient #cpus are just fine.
Students are encouraged to experiment, and some went to try fork bombs.
To minimize the effect on other users on the same machine I implemented
per user projects. On the solaris 11.3/sunray box, the users environment
who started the fork bomb, gets killed. Ok for that.
On the OI box with 30 xdmcp called x-sessions, if one user runs over the
max-lwps boundary, all x-sessions of all 30 users get killed in that
case.

On the oracle solaris 11.3 and the OI box, I had entries per user as of
user.student01:100::student::project.max-lwps=(privileged,500,deny)
This happened to be on a 5.11 illumos-f1cd2b6cd0 i86pc i386 i86pc OI box.
The rather high number of lwp is casued by firefox usage, which spreads
in to many lwp for each and every tab and action.

This term it will be solaris 11.3/sunray again for that course, it is
simpler and saves a lot of time...
By the way, even in this oracle-solaris/sunray setup, we don't use gnome
or mate. Too ressource consuming, too slow.

In another course on administration I have a T4-4 with ldoms, so that each
student sets up and administers his own partition. They are doing zfs-training
on that box. And I use a sparc-T-class because of its simplicity and robust-
ness. Sadly no OpenIndiana on sparc hardware. So for the OI-Part it's only
a virtualized environment, not as robust as the sparc box...
But, you asked for desktop, not for backend:)

so, adding to the wishlist:)
  - please put back the libraries needed for sunray on OI
  - sparc port of OI (why was sparc removed anyway?)

/Rolf

Quoting Till Wegmueller <toasterson at gmail.com>:

> Hi Rolf,
>
> Can you go into details on how SRM/projects is an issue for you?  
> This is the first time I hear it mentioned. Would love to hear how  
> more and how you would like to use it.
>
> -Till
>
> On 03.02.25 18:42, Rolf M. Dietze wrote:
>> Hi,
>> this thread is actually very welcome to me.
>>
>> I had 2 issues that refrained me from using OI as a regular
>> desktop system, that was the rather old firefox, but as far
>> as I know, Carsten Grzemba made this problem vanish, thanks
>> for that, it was a key issue. And a lot of driver problems
>> with older Nvidia boards, sorry we are still on old hardware
>> here:)
>> Another point is some problems with resourcemanagement. Having
>> multiple leftover Fujitsu-Futros netbooting NetBSD to then
>> calling XDMCP-sessions from one OI box in the back, I had SRM
>> configured as per user project. Bad thing if a user exceeds
>> their limitations, the x-server is killed, killing all other
>> x-sessions. This in fact was a show stopper, leading me back
>> to FreeBSD. We are mostly running xfce, twm  and alike, no
>> gnome or mate, they are too slow and unhandy to our users.
>>
>> Another point, at least on notebooks, is the lack of wpa-psk
>> support e.g. wlan-login to eduroam etc. This lead us to use
>> FreeBSD on most notebooks as well. Most single desktop boxes
>> run OI or MacOSX, in fact, we don't use windows on any of our
>> boxes because of, well, we don't like the look and feel of it
>> and, there is no zfs underneath:)
>>
>> so with me it is SRM/projects and wifi w/o wpa-psk and the
>> like
>>
>> /Rolf
>>
>>
>> Quoting Till Wegmüller <toasterson at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> Hello all
>>>
>>> During FOSDEM I had a talk with a couple people about Desktop  
>>> Painpoints and how they would like to use OpenIndiana as their  
>>> daily driver but a couple of things are just not working or  
>>> toomuch effort.
>>>
>>> In a first step to address those I would also like to collect  
>>> Feedback from the community on those Painpoints and collect other  
>>> Reasons OpenIndiana does not work as a main driver even if you  
>>> want to use it.
>>>
>>> What are your Painpoints?
>>>
>>> We currently know of
>>> - Missing WebRTC and thus Chatapp(Teams, Google Meet, Jitsi) Support
>>> - Old Wifi stack
>>> - Graphics Card support (AMDGPU and newer Intel)
>>>
>>> Please also feel free to drop comments on those listed above. Or  
>>> list which Apps force you to use Windows VM's for Work.
>>>
>>> We hope to build a good COntributor base that doesn't mean we will  
>>> address every painpoint. But it should be good enough so that  
>>> People feel compelled to Contribute the last missing piece.
>>>
>>> Looking forward to your answers
>>> Till
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> openindiana-discuss mailing list
>>> openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org
>>> https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
>>
>>
>>
>>
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