[OmniOS-discuss] Installing OmniOS

[Heinz Nikolaus Gies]

Hi,
I've been trying (and finally succeeded after about 4 days) in installing OmniOS and wanted to give a little feedback. Since it was a very frustrating experience let me start with saying that, despite that I really enjoy OmniOS now that it is on the system ;) and that your guys work on the system is hugely appriciated. But I think that the install process can be improved, a lot.

From what I understand there are basically two ways to go, kayak, and the installer both have their problems, lets start with kayak sice I don't have much to say to that it's the path I did not choose.

Kayak might work well to add additional systems to a existing OmniOS installation but when starting off w/o a existing OmniOS system poses some problems, mostly the 'install wit hkayak from a non OmniOS OS' tels you to install OmniOS to copy the required files. So as a suggestion of improvment: package the required files somewhere easiely downlaodable and put a link in the manual. (If that link had existed I propably had went with kayak and you missed all the nice bugs I found in the isntaller ;)

The isntaller - it crashes, a lot, a lot lot. It crashes when:

- using 3TB disks
- entering partition sizes that do not fit (even so are not obviouysly wrong). i.e. if it tells you 110.8 GB are available you enter 110.8 -> crash (I guess it was something like 110.79).
- you select a disk with UEFI labels.
- randomly when cycling between parition types.
- basically any other place where you can enter data and it is not a perfectly valid value.

The problem with the crashing is that you need to start form scratch, and that can be painful.

In addition to that:

It does not allow you to select slices unless you manaually created more then one before hand. This can be very annoying since you need to drop out of the instaler to do that.

It can get into a state during slice selection where you can't change the type of slices any more, none could be marked as rpool

Generally unless you want a 1 full disk spanning rpool it will be a very painful experience requiring a lot of work in the console beforehand.

So now the 'complaining' is over on the installer and here a suggestion how to improve.

Since it will propably be very hard to make a good graphical installer and get rid of all the bugs (even so the crashes might be worth fixing) it would be very cool if there was a way to drop in the console, set up the disks/pools/etc and just tell the system: please skip the graphical thing, i created the rpool for you, now install the system in it and put grub onto disk <whatever>

Cheers,
Heinz
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