[indiana-discuss] Some Thoughts After An Installfest Event

[Qingye Jiang (John)]

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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

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

I will try to write more later.

Best regards,

-- 

 ("`-''-/").___..--''"`-._             Qingye Jiang (John)
  `6_ 6  )   `-.  (     ).`-.__.`)     Senior Manager
   (_Y_.)'  ._   )  `._ `. ``-..-      Sun Developer Network, China
  _..`--'_..-_/  /--'_.' ,'            Phone: +86-10-62673347
 (il),-''  (li),'  ((!.-'              http://developers.sun.com.cn/
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