[indiana-discuss] new ISO soon?

[James Cornell]

Jyri Virkki wrote:
> Roman Strobl wrote:
>   
>> 2008.05 gives us an opportunity to re-introduce Solaris at universities, 
>> because it will work on hardware students use (well mostly).
>>     
>
> Yes except for the excessive memory usage, which is a killer ;-( 
>
> The audience at the last two Sun Tech Days were mostly students and of
> everyone who showed up at the installfest tables over both events, I
> can think of only two people who had enough RAM in their laptop for a
> comfortable install (both of whom were already S10 users, so a
> different demographic). Everyone else ranged from "sorry kid there's
> just no way" to "um, yes that shold work but it'll take a while and
> won't be as fast as your Linux install so let me set some expectations..."
>
> If we're serious about making it attractive to students the memory
> usage is IME the main problem to address.
>
>
>   
Indeed... even the most "bloated" linux distro at boot uses about 400mb 
ram, while OpenSolaris' installer forces you to have 768mb, even if you 
have shared and have 766mb mappable, it will fail.  An installer does 
not need 768mb, nor does an operating system, unless for some reason the 
out of box configuration populates 20gb of mysql tables and starts it 
upon next reboot.

The installer is GTK/C, it isn't Java, and even Java on S10 used less.  
The second issue is fingerprint... I do not like indiana, it's aimed 
squarely at developers, and will be for another year my guess.  I prefer 
SXCE, I do not like error prone bandwidth wasting installers, like 
debian's netinst or indiana, I want the packages available on the same 
media or split up but offline.  The Core install on Solaris 10 is 10x 
less than SXCE B90's.  Installation requirement for full install is 9gb 
on SXCE, while it takes 6gb of raw space, while Solaris 10 U5 uses 4gb 
of space with no overhead requirement, just enough to cram the raw data 
into.  The organization of packages is another problem, on Indiana and 
on SXCE, then the dependencies and default "extra" package selections 
which add more bloat which most if not all people do not need on initial 
install of something as trivial as minicom, mc, links, gnome or firefox.

James