[indiana-discuss] Some Thoughts After An Installfest Event

[sanjay nadkarni (Laptop)]

Hi John,
    Thanks for the feedback.  I would appreciate you could answer my 
questions in line.

Qingye Jiang (John) wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Today in Beijing we organized an installfest event with OpenSolaris
> 2008.05. The machines we used are Lenovo E680A, which has an intel
> core-duo 1.73 GHz CPU with 1 GB memory. This was a full-day event -- we
> provided 45 laptops, which attracted more than 100 people during the
> whole event. They were instructed to install OpenSolaris 2008.05 from
> CD, and install some packages via IPS and traditional method. Some
> engineers and interns from Sun were there to provide onsite. Most of the
> attendees had but very little experience with Solaris previously, some
> of them used Linux for various periods before.
>
> Some feedbacks:
>
> (1) Installation was very slow. We used to install SXDE onto the same
> machine before, which took us less than 45 minutes to finished. Today,
> most of the folks spent about the same amount of time on installation.
> We think this is too much to install a CD.
>   
Which iso did you use ?  The limited language version or all languages ? 
> (2) There was some problem with WIFI, don't know exactly. Some of the
> machines were getting IP, and most of them were not. It took extremely
> long for the AP selection dialog to popup after the system booted. There
> were several Mac and Windows machines in the same room and worked just
> fine during the whole day. "wificonfig -i wpi0 scan" return the correct
> information, but "wificonfig -i wpi0 connect AP_Name" would failed. At
> first we suspected that this was because the name of the AP was Chinese,
> but when we changed the name of the AP to English we encountered the
> same error.
>   
What wifi chipset does this system use ?  Could you post the output 
from  the device detection utility ?
> (3) A majority of the people complained that OpenSolaris could not mount
> their USB drive correctly. Well, we did see some success, but a lot of
> failures at the same time.
>
>   
Could you elaborate the type of failures you saw.  Were these on USB 
sticks or hard drives.  I have seen issues with
certain USB sticks.

> (4) Compiz totally failed due to the fact that we are using integrated
> graphic cards. The problem is, when Compiz failed it is very difficult
> to turn it back to non-3D desktop. We knew how to do the trick via Alt+N
> key combinations, but sometimes the system was not able to response to
> this trick.
>   
> (5) Many people would like the shutdown button be placed at a more
> visible location.
>
> (6) When connected to the networked, there was a network icon on the
> task bar, and it is annoying that you can change anything via clicking
> on that icon. Since NWAM was not yet smart enough (to pick up the AP's
> in a timely manner) during the show and so new to the folks, they were
> very unhappy about this.
>   
Are you referring to the network monitor on the task bar ?  If so I am 
puzzled as to how this can happen since
it requires one specifically choosing to add that to widget to the task bar.

> (7) For those who have previously installed Solaris 10 or SXDE, they
> were happy about the installation procedure, and the new UI.
>
>   

Thanks for the feedback.


-Sanjay

> I will try to write more later.
>
> Best regards,
>
>