[geeks] Solaris resiliency to crashing w/full root partition?

Thu Sep 29 14:49:36 CDT 2005

On Thu, 2005-09-29 at 14:36, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> 
> Even the text installers leave quite a bit to be desired.
> 
> Linux, BSD, even DEC UNIX have far better installers.
> 
> After all these years, why are Sun's installers so bad?
> 

I believe that the reason is: everyone at the company uses networked installs, so they are not subjected to the pain of a bad installer often enough to want to fix it.

IBM had programmers working on OS/2, and as reliably as clockwork, every OS installer they shipped required you to turn off your L2 cache in order to install.  It was a bug that they never seemed to get fixed.

Why?  All IBM programmers were using IBM machines that did not have L2 cache, so they never saw the problem with a hanging install.  Only the customers that tried to install it on non-IBM hardware (like the local clone box), where the L2 cache was always installed and enabled by default, saw the problem.

I maintain that it is the same thing with Sun and installers.

--Patrick