[OmniOS-discuss] X11 application support

[Marion Hakanson]

Hi Theo,

Thanks for your comments, I found them helpful.  Thanks also for
making OmniOS available to the rest of us.


jesus at omniti.com said:
> A few things that might help you our
> 
> 1) this is not in core by design.

No complaints here.


> 2) using a browser remotely sounds painful... try ssh options to either
> forward a port (-L) or act as a SOCKS proxy (-D) both *super* useful.

Perhaps painful is in the eye of the beholder.  Using "ssh -X" or "ssh -Y"
and running firefox on the remote server "just works".  Maybe I'm missing
something, but "ssh -L" for connecting to a Dell server's DRAC-Enterprise
or other embedded webserver takes a fair amount of trial and error to suss
out what ports, URL's, and/or hostnames their developers require in order
to work.  E.g. the DRAC-Enterprise, or SuperMicro BMC's often have some
kind of remote KVM java app built into them, and those have their own
obscure assumptions about connectivity, too.


> 3) this does not solve your "I can only manage an HBA with a Java GUI
> issue"... you should burn that vendor's offices down*.
> . . .
> * please don't actually burn anything down, just vote with your budget and
> buy products that don't suffer this way

Been there, done that, have a collection of T-shirts from companies
that have gone out of business as a result (:-).  Still have some of
their products in use, though, and plenty of stuff that I had no say
about purchasing.


> 4) There are people using Joyent's pkgsrc work to build X libs.

This is one avenue I'm working on.  A fall-back is using OpenIndiana
for this type of light remote/virtual desktop stuff.  Or maybe a Mac,
or a Linux box, etc.  Shame to need a whole box for it, though.


> What I'd really love to see is someone start a desktop IPS repo on top of
> OmniOS.  Build X11 stuff and publish it there.  Once that happens, the whole
> community can benefit.  Another awesome option that would likely be much more
> fruitful would be to hack pkgsrc to publish IPS artifacts.  That said, I have
> no desire to build or maintain anything related to X11, so it shan't be me
> that does it. 

Me too (for all of the above paragraph)!


> I can share our approach to such things, it may or may not help.  I have a
> private IPS repo for my junk.  Without own private IPS repo, I concern myself
> less with the redistribution rights of what I place in there.  We take an
> IPS-or-nothing approach.  If I find myself with a piece of software that
> doesn't have an IPS (tar, installer, etc. etc.).  I take a machine and
> install it, I find all files it provided and create an IPS manifest, I SMF it
> if it hasn't been and put that int he manifest. I run it, if it doesn't work
> due to missing libraries, I create a private directory somewhere reasonable
> and relative to the install path and place the missing shared libraries in
> there.  I add that to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH in the SMF manifest and add the
> libs to the package manifest.... once it works, I pkgsend the manifest to my
> server and voila.  I know how said piece of software installable via IPS in
> non-snowflake fashion. 

Good to know.

I've taken this approach in the past -- been doing this long enough to have
used three or four different automatic build/package/install frameworks.
It's turned out to not be sustainable given the resources our organization
has had available in recent years.  Not that that stops me from trying....

Again, thanks to everyone for their comments.

Regards,

Marion