[rescue] Happy New Year! RIP, Sun/Solaris...

[Joshua Boyd]

On 1/2/2011 2:29 PM, Jonathan J. M. Katz wrote:

> This is going to dissolve quickly, but frankly I like a primitive
> userspace. With less stuff, there is less stuff to break, and the
> system will only have the components you want.
>
> For instance, I need to do smaller installs of CentOS for VMs for
> work. That's fine, but by default (both 5.5 and 4.8) they include
> things like postgres libs, dovecot IMAP, their apache, X11 etc. I then
> have to spend time removing crap I don't need that eats up disk space
> and causes library conflicts with $WORK's software. Although disk is
> cheap, I want a smaller footprint so VMs will upload quickly to
> headquarters over my limited upstream and fit on smaller thumb drives
> for training classes, etc. With CentOS if I use yum to remove
> "postgres-libs" which conflicts with $WORK's own postgres the system
> becomes unusable, because it removes system-config stuff!
>
> The *option* of installing $KITCHEN_SINK is nice, because you know it
> is pre-rolled and all the dependencies are there, but for the tasks I
> do, it isn't the best deal.

I wish I could more easily get something inbetween.

I like having a minimal openbsd/netbsd install to start with, but I wish 
they were more modern.  On Solaris, I love SMF, but I wish they had less 
stuff going by default.  Especially when I start making zones, the 
unneeded crap really can start to drain resources unless I take time to 
turn it all off (really should pay attention next time and make a script 
to do it for me).