Thoughts about OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris have come a long way, but there still a lot of work to do get near what most linux distributions and *BSD’s do.

Here are my toughts about of what I think Sun and the community should work with

The possibility to trim OpenSolaris down!
A default install of OpenSolaris is about 4GB. Disk space is cheap, I know, but something is terribly wrong when the default is 4GB and that it does not contain any developer utilities (GCC or Sun Studio)  – But I can live with a default of a operating system to be 4GB /if/ I had the possibility to trim it down a little. Right now that is not possible. Well, it is *possible* by either 1) creating your own OpenSolaris distribution 2) Uninstalling the unneeded packages yourself 3) Setup a Automated Install (in Solaris 10 speak that is the same as Jumpstart) which is so wrong at some many levels (se below)

Why force GNOME and Xorg as default install when Solaris is mostly used as a server OS?

More mirrors

pkg.opensolaris.org is slow. Painfully slow. And I can’t find any list of official mirrors.

OpenSolaris require OpenSolaris

In order to setup AI (Automated Install) you need OpenSolaris. I can’t find any official document that says otherwise. And I find that hard to understand. I mean, it’s only pxeboot! Do it the way Debian and Ubuntu does it: They release a netboot.tar.gz which includes pxeboot, a installkernel and ramdisk. If I had anything to say OpenSolaris would have done the same thing. Maybe together with a XML file that describes the installation options to do it even more easier.

Setting up a pkg mirror is also i PITA. I need some special magic Sun software to be able to do that. Why not just create a mirror with rsync and let me choose if I want to share the packages with http, apache or NFS. It’s only files, not some chinese black magic!

Mailinglists

There are over 373 different mailinglist for OpenSolaris (and OpenSolaris projects) – That’s way to much!

Bug tracking

I still don’t know if I should report a bug to http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz or http://bugs.opensolaris.org. And when I did report something to bugs.opensolaris.org I got a mail with some kind of bug ID which did not exist in any of those two systems.

Reporting a bug is almost worth it’s own story. There where about 6-7 fields that was mandatory, whereas two of them was drop-down menus with at least 100 different types to choose from. For a newbie it would be impossible to know what to input where when he/she all  want to do was to help and report that he/she recived a warning during boot up with the new and facy mainboard.