Hi guys.

I'm using SXDE at home since the last 3 or 4 releases and I just saw that SXDE program has been discontinued in favor of OpenSolaris. I'm downloading now the CD and I have some questions, some of them perhaps naive, which I would like to answer before replacing SXDE.

- What I've been liking of SXCE and SXDE is the feeling of "continuity" with Solaris. Maybe it's just a fear but, for example, it sounds pretty strange to have /usr/gnu/bin in the PATH (as I was reading in the "What's new" @ opensolaris.com) by default before /usr/bin. I mean, it seems natural to me to use commands which supports Sun's extensions, such ACL support for example, as in ls' -v switch. Will this kind of things change in the next release of Solaris or they'll be peculiarities of OpenSolaris?
- SXDE is roughly 4GB, while OpenSolaris is less than 1 GB. My / filesystems is more or less 7 GB just after the installation of SXDE. What will I be missing with respect of a full Solaris installation?
- A question about the documentation. I'm used to the (in my opinion) excellent documentation I find in docs.sun.com. I noticed that the documentation of OpenSolaris is not even listed in docs.sun.com. Furthermore, a quick look at www.opensolaris.org and www.opensolaris.com doesn't make me feel "comfortable" about the organization of the documentation.

Any consideration at this respect from you guys?

Bye,
Enrico.

SXCE is not discontinued. It is technically identical to SXDE, actually more up to date.
I guess the goal is to be more friendly to users caming from Gnu based OSes. You are certainly free to reorder the PATH elements to suit your needs, like I do.
True, but newcomers prefer ls fancy colors, go figure ...
I more than strongly doubt about it. That would break compatibility which is something taken seriously by Solaris engineering.
The first I see missing are Xsun, CDE and StarOffice. Non obsolete/encumbered apps can be installed from repositories, eg. openoffice.
Most of Solaris Express /OpenSolaris.org documentation is still relevant with Open Solaris.

Yes, I know. But as I use this workstation as a development machine, I'm not changing OS so often and preferred to stick with a more tested version of Solaris, even if I always read about the great stability of SXCE.

I see Then I think I'm reordering my PATH, too.

The only thing I'll be missing will be StarOffice, I just quite get used to it and sort of... prefer it.

I suppose. By the way, I also used Solaris docs when I could not find relevant documentation. But do you know if a "documentation project" is on the way, to build something organized as docs.sun.com? I mean: some basic Solaris administration (as auditing, monitoring, etc.) is not covered by opensolaris projects, is it?

Thanks for all the answers!
Enrico.

There is new package software system. I believe it is very easy to install StarOffice via it?

A question Jilliagre: Now it suffices to create one single pool, and we install the root in one filesystem and create filesystems for the users, right? No more "allocating 4GB to /opt, allocating 5GB to /"? Everything goes into one root filesystem that grows dynamically? How do you layout your file systems? One big?

kebabbert, my understanding of ZFS suggests that there's no need to allocate space because every filesystem on a zpool will allocate space from the pool when necessary. I would indeed create filesystems for every user to set "quotas" on them. With ZFS, creating a FS is very light so you can assign a FS to an user and set a constraint on the FS size, instead of assigning quotas to users as we did with other filesystems. The documentation suggests to use entire disks as a pool, but if you want you could slice the disk and create pools on slices rather than using the entire disk as a single pool but personally I cannot see any advantage on doing this.