Did I mention in one of my earlier posts that opensolaris is definately not yet ready for the home user ?.
I’d like to re-inforce that one again.
And yes I know I keep harping on about it. But opensolaris 200805 installs with gnome, games, office tools etc., but no server/development tools like gcc, java SDK, apache, mysql; so is obviously targeted at home desktop users rather than the geeks who want to play with zones and zfs at home.
Its just the underlying OS is not suitable/manageable for home users unless they all want to become solaris administrators, and would make most home users go out and buy Vista.
Anyway, on the home front, I finally had opensolaris going just the way I liked, although having the firefox update option greyed out was a pain as obviously I’m not getting security updates.
Anyway, thought I would go back into package manager and pull down lots more packages. That turns out to have been a mistake.
It pulled down all the packages I wanted but seemed to hang halfway through the installation of the packages. Having lots of experience with solaris 8 I knew some of these would take a while, so I left it overnight. In the morning, still hung at the same place.
So I rebooted, with difficulty as the menu ‘system/shutdown-reboot’ option was doing nothing, tried it multiple times and even kill -9’ed the apps that were running apart from the terminal. So, ‘sync;sync;sync;reboot’.
It never came back; lots of messages saying it couldn’t find the kernel, but the last message always being depress any key to reboot.
Managed to get it into single-user/maintenance-mode. A zpool scrub, and mounted the zfs root filesystem and had a look. Well, ok, the kernel it was saying it couldn’t find truely was not there ??.
Funny thing is I was only pulling down application packages, what happened to my kernel ?.
Yes, I did have an old snapshot. From the initial install, with none of my customisations; bugger.
So I have gone with a complete re-install of opensolaris, which is happening as I type.
When done I will take it as far as it was stable last time
- manually install the network drivers again
- customise it all up again and get it networked
- reinstall the gcc compilers I need
- get down all the firefox plugins
- maybe look for apache and mysql as well this time
- take a snapshot
- clone the rootfs into another bootable image
- make the cloned image the default and play with that
From take a snapshot down is just something a home user is not going to be able to do.
I almost just installed FC9 again, I had the kickstart CD in my hand. But I thought I’ll give it one more go.
After all, it was my fault I didn’t have recent a snapshot to roll back from this time.
Hmm, on my todo list. Trawl the web and see if mkCDrec runs under opensolaris, or if there is something similar. Whats needed is a bootable recovery image that can restore the entire system tothe state it was in at the time the backup was taken.
I guess thats onother area that probably needs work as it would need to backup all the unmounted rpool zfs filesystems as well as the current one.
