[osol-mktg] Re: perceptions of OpenSolaris

[Tim Foster]

Hey All,

On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 12:37 +0100, Patrick Finch wrote:
> is quite right.  It isn't as approachable as the most polished Linux 
> distros, some things are still quite tricky (e.g. I have had problems 
> configuring printers) and somethings are just not there (some 
> multimedia, suspend/resume especially) but I think that people would be 
> surprised that you can plug in your digital camera, or any USB disk, or 
> a phone card, or that there's Wifi support.

Yep, all these are good points - I'm just wondering when would be a good
time for them to do that review.

Imho, we're almost, but not quite at the stage where such an article
would be well worth getting.

Would it make sense to ask the folks working on volume/device management
to see when's a good time for such a review to happen (giving them a few
more weeks to fix open bugs could be beneficial, eg. my iPod doesn't
automatically mount all the time, and gnome-vold crashes from time to
time)

Likewise, would it make sense to wait for some of the NWAM project to
integrate, which would make configuring wifi & networking a *lot* for
the average man on the street (which it isn't, yet...)

If possible, doing the review on a machine with an nvidia graphics card
would be cool too (there's a System Tools->NVidia X Server Settings tool
in the GNOME menu now, which makes configuring a lot easier) - just an
added bonus though, we're already pretty good with most graphics cards.

Finally, pointing to 
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/hcts/device_detect.html would be
worthwhile as well I think.

All that said, you could end up getting into a perpetual "nearly done,
just one more bugfix" state and the article would never get written.

In general, I agree - OpenSolaris on the desktop has improved in leaps
and bounds over the last year or so, and we need to get the message out
there.

	cheers,
			tim

> Stephen Lau wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 08:12:24AM +0530, Joe G (Joseph George) wrote:
> >> Yes, there is a perception that Solaris is not approachable.
> >>
> >> I personally have seen the look of amazement on the faces of folks who 
> >> have tried the BeleniX liveCD. I have told many that they can get the 
> >> same desktop if there were to install SX.
> > 
> > ... and that would be misleading.
> > (IIRC) Belenix uses either xfce or KDE, neither of which is available
> > with a default SX install.
> > 
> > -steve
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-- 
Tim Foster, Sun Microsystems Inc, Solaris Engineering Ops
http://blogs.sun.com/timf