[rescue] Solaris for PrimePower 250?

[Ian Finder]

I guess after dealing with the IRIX installer everything else seems
like a crowning achievement in usability.

I agree the error Solaris gives on unlabeled disks is really dumb
though.
Makes you think your drive / SCSI controller is messing up-- not that
the disk hasn't been prepped.

Sent via mobile. From: JP Hindin
Sent: 4/24/2013 13:59
To: The Rescue List
Subject: Re: [rescue] Solaris for PrimePower 250?
On Wed, 24 Apr 2013, Dr. Robert Pasken wrote:
> No Debian isn't pampering you, you are just using a very old version of
> Solaris. Look to see what Linux was like in the late 1990's and early
> 2000's. A current version of Solaris, I use OpenIndiana on my cluster,
> understands unlabeled disks and automagically formats and labels them
> for you just like current releases of Linux/Windows. As a passing note

Well, I'm not going to stand and point at specifically the Debian
installer and say it is the panacaea of installers - but Solaris 10u7 was
released in 2005 and the Deb installer has been the way it's been since
2002, so, yea, it kinda did beat the crap out of Solaris.

OpenIndiana doesn't have an official release candidate for SPARC - which
is the only type of Sun hardware I have - so I haven't tried it yet.
Unfortunately my machines are finicky so even installing off disc media is
a bit of a task right now, so that hasn't helped.

> at one point you had to build a kernel specifically for your hardware
> because shared loadable libraries didn't exist. The install process
> asked a bunch of questions and then built and installed a kernel for you.

I don't recall that and I've been using the Deb installer since '01 or
so... but I believe you, clearly it was before I was using it.

Like I said - I'm not going to stand on the mount and proclaim the Deb
installer as the final word. But in 2005 when Solaris 10u7 was current, it
was a mature system that couldn't match an upstart like Debian's
installer. And I kinda think it should.

I'm glad OpenIndiana decided to be a bit more friendly... although
sometimes I get this feeling in the back of my head that this stuff SHOULD
be a little hard to remind us we're actually supposed to be clever to use
it.

 - JP

> On 4/24/13 3:40 PM, JP Hindin wrote:
> > On Wed, 24 Apr 2013, Ian Finder wrote:
> >>> Yes, that's true.
> >>> But I was talking about how to open another shell from inside the installer.
> >> Even on text install, after failing to acquire a target disk, the
> >> install gracefully fails to a shell.
> >>
> >> It really is quite easy to use :)
> > If you know to run 'format'... which as a first time Solaris installer I
> > didn't and had no damned clue that the installer's problem was it couldn't
> > find a disk with the right disklabel, not that it was unable to locate any
> > physical disks.
> >
> > Oh Debian, you have pampered me so.
> >
> >   - JP
> >
> >> On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 12:27 PM, Steven M Jones <smj+rescue at crash.com> wrote:
> >>> On 04/24/2013 12:00, Sandwich Maker wrote:
> >>>> [...] but on all the installers
> >>>>
> >>>> from sunos4 up to solaris 8, you can simply right-click over the
> >>>> desktop and a menu [...]
> >>>
> >>> Desktop? Menu? In the SunOS 4 installer? ISTR it was always text console for
> >>> SunOS 4.
> >>>
> >>> In fact after a couple years in the working world I encountered an old
> >>> Sun-2/150U that had SunOS 3 on it, and discovered the SunTools-based GUI
> >>> installer, and howled because they had given up something that convenient
> >>> for the text-only stuff on SunOS 4.
> >>>
> >>> --S.
> >>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >>     Ian Finder
> >>     (206) 395-MIPS
> >>     ian.finder at gmail.com
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
> > _______________________________________________
> > rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>
> --
> Cheers
> RWP
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
_______________________________________________
rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue