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List:       opensolaris-install-discuss
Subject:    Re: [install-discuss] Support for installation to & boot
From:       Dave Miner <dminer () opensolaris ! org>
Date:       2008-07-25 14:39:13
Message-ID: 4889E591.8040609 () opensolaris ! org
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Turcin Ponican wrote:
> Hello everybody again,
> thank you for all the comments. I have more questions, feel free to react.
> 
> I have taken a look at Dave Miner's presentation. Unfortunately, I 
> cannot agree with the major points.
> 
> On slide #1, Dave mentions that the OpenSolaris target users are 
> developers & deployers. Isn't this precisely the reason why OpenSolaris 
> still fails to build a strong community? Is it a right thing to leave 
> out ordinary users? Isn't it like saying "Oh, we don't care about 
> regular users, OpenSolaris is not good for them anyway"? In my opinion, 
> a developer community (which Dave would like to target) only arises from 
> a strong user community - not the other way. A person who tries 
> OpenSolaris must first like to use it, otherwise he/she just won't 
> develop anything for (or with) it.
> 

For now, the limitations in OpenSolaris and usability issues make it 
relatively unsuitable for a mass market of non-technical users. 
Developers are the best shorthand profile for the people we think can 
accept some of those limitations in exchange for the other features.

> Maybe I'm missing a point here. Who are those developers that 
> OpenSolaris is targeted at? Are they Solaris developers? I thought that 
> they were Unix/Linux developers, and that OpenSolaris is trying to be 
> attractive for them. If this is the case, I wouldn't expect that anybody 
> would just throw Linux away and start fresh with OpenSolaris. Again, if 
> this is the case, OpenSolaris just needs to take a friendly step towards 
> (say) Linux users as soon as possible. Having to re-shuffle all 
> partitions on a disk is certainly not what I would call "inviting 
> interactive installation" (slide #1) or "painless experience" (slide #2).
> 
> Considering this, why is Linux awareness/co-existence planned for 
> 2009.10 and Extended Partition Support for 2010.04 (and not sooner)?
> 

We agree that it's not ideal, but as Jim Carlson said, it's a simple 
matter of priorities vs. resources.  Each of the things you note could 
be done much sooner, but if nobody else steps up and takes them, then 
this is when my team would get to them.

> I have received a message by Todd E. Moore, advicing to try out 
> OpenSolaris in VirtualBox. Thanks Todd, I will tell my friends to try 
> this. But still I'm having a gut feeling that this workaround is a 
> little tough. VirtualBox is (according to references) easy to use, but 
> inevitably slower than a native system. A review by heise.de 
> <http://heise.de> (http://www.heise.de/open/VirtualBox--/artikel/83678) 
> estimates an OS run in VirtualBox to be roughly about half as fast as a 
> native OS.
> 

I run a lot of VB VM's.  It's a bit slower, I guess, but really quite 
good.  If you consider that a separate OS installation has zero 
performance when you aren't booted from it, then VB is an infinite 
improvement ;-)

Dave
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