[indiana-discuss] Observations while testing 101a-rc1b iso standard image

[Torsten Blix]

Hi all,

I tried out the 101a-rc1b iso standard image (live CD) inside VirtualBox 
on Windows Vista (64bit).

I noticed a couple of things:
1) The (VirtualBox) standard of 512 MB RAM for the virtual machine does 
not go well together with the live CD image. OpenSolaris boots OK into 
the graphical UI, but the UI is extremely slow and doing anything (like 
opening a terminal) takes ages if it succeeds at all. E.g. opening the 
terminal printed a couple of error messages (something with "could not 
fork") before finally showing the prompt (and top showed ~4MB of free 
memory). The OpenSolaris getting started guide actually mentions 512MB 
as minimum requirements for a install with VirtualBox, but the system I 
got was definitely NOT usable. Probably 512MB are fine if running 
without GUI, but I'd suspect that the majority of users that read the 
"getting started" want a GUI ...

Increasing the available RAM for the VM fixed the problem.

2) During boot of the LiveCD I saw the following warning message (this 
was already reported by Josh Simmons to this list):
WARNING: pcplusmp: mod_remove_by_name failed 16

3) I wanted to try out the powertop utility ... as the standard LiveCD 
user 'jack' I got the following error message:

powertop : ../cpuidle.c : cannot open dtrace library: DTrace requires 
additional privileges

OK, trying 'sudo powertop' tells me, that I do not have the rights to 
execute sudo. After a 'su -' I could finally run powertop. However, 
after hitting 'r' (for refresh) the first line of the screen contains a 
(inverted and thus very obvious/ugly) error message:

powertop: ../battery.c : battery kstat not found -1

even though the output of powertop looked OK. This is not really an 
ideal user experience for a first time user who wants to look at the new 
features.

4) Install to hard disk from inside the VM worked without a problem.


Are any of these worthy of a bug report? What do you think?

Cheers,
Torsten