Comments on: OpenSolaris: Even the download system puts you off

By: Hyperion

Hyperion — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:41:00 +0000

Do You know about this fairly obscure legacy Operating System known as Win Doze? Well, some lunatics still use it. And guess what, it’s legacy File System cannot hold a file as large as the Slowlaris DVD image. It does, however, have a DVD burning program that supports burning from a segmented image.

Sure, if you live on the trendy side you may have never even considered touching this peculiar legacy OS, but it’s still nice to know that the glorious Sun thought about this minor and feltering population of Windows users, and helps them spot the Light at the end of the tunnel.

By: tecosystems » links for 2007-06-27

tecosystems » links for 2007-06-27 — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 05:32:35 +0000

[...] Colin Charles Agenda » Blog Archive » OpenSolaris: Even the download system puts you off “An OpenSolaris newbie like me, ended up picking the Community edition…all 3 1GB zip files, you get the pleasure of unzipping…every one of them, and then…use cat to make them into one large DVD ISO.” – marked as NI, for Needs Improvement (tags: Sun Solaris Express Community distribution) [...]

By: l3v1

l3v1 — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 13:59:32 +0000

Well, I also voted for the free kit, the dvd with everything on it arrived in about a week or so. Previously I used to download the images from time to time, yet I dind’t find cat-ing the images together to be such a hassle. This is not Ubuntu – oh, how happy that makes me – and if someone can’t create the writeable image, then stepping a step back into Windows maybe isn’t such a bad idea. If you complain about the hassle… all I can say is in this life, on this planet, in software land, in OS land, there are much bigger hassles we have to live day by day, one Solaris image cat-ing isn’t really the last drip of water yet.

By: cos

cos — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:40:13 +0000

I got my free media kit within a couple of days (which I’d accidentally ordered, but never mind) – it’s the “developer express” release from 02/07 (sunstudio, netbeans, etc. included), so if you really give a stuff you’d probably want to download a newer one.

On a similar note, I’m annoyed that RHN doesn’t let you download DVD images *at all* – I had to download 11 CD images of RHEL5 (32- and 64-bit) instead.

I’d be happy if Sun could do something like the Ubuntu single CD server install, grabbing the rest off the net afterwards.

In any case, it’s going to take time for this kind of stuff to change. I’m happy for Sun to do it, but they’d better not stop innovating (ZFS, DTrace, SMF, etc.) in order to play catch-up…

By: Chris Samuel

Chris Samuel — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:24:21 +0000

Bah – typo in above comment! Colin could I beg you to fix that and then delete this comment please ? Thanks!

By: Chris Samuel

Chris Samuel — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:23:00 +0000

Just to quickly answer my own question (mea culpa) – , it’s just the CDDL.

By: Chris Samuel

Chris Samuel — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:21:07 +0000

Hmm, does the OpenSolaris license prohibit you from distributing benchmark results without written permission ? I know the Solaris 10 license does prohibit these.

By: Simos

Simos — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 20:18:24 +0000

I don’t think either there is much of purpose to distribute in segments.

If the servers support to resume downloads, then one can use a download manager for the task. Even wget can do the job well, http://simos.info/blog/archives/620 (downloading the Ubuntu DVD ISO).

With segments, one needs about twice the disk space to put the segments together.

The benefit of open-source is you can get all these fast academic mirrors to mirror for you. If you are interested in stats, simply set the home page of the browser to reference an image, just like Fedora did for F7.

By: Jeff Waugh

Jeff Waugh — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 16:44:12 +0000

They have something similar to shipit already. :-)