[OmniOS-discuss] OmniOS doc

[Steffen Kram]

> I think an OmniOS Survival guide would be great.

Theo, I think that would be a really good idea. In my opinion some pages of the current wiki admin guide are already a very good first start (e.g. networking and zones). What’s missing in my point of view are „Migration Guides“ from other operating systems, especially linux and freebsd. Those migration guides should cover all things that look „strange“ for non-solaris folks e.g. partitioning, they should elaborate how to best use the „specialities“ e.g. how to use smf, fmd ..., what are the benefits of crossbow, what’s that automounter thing? Why is my home not in /home?

Those are the questions I often get from people not familiar with Illumos/Solaris. I already startet a couple of notes that would cover some of those questions. Helping newbies or linux-sysadmins to get started with omnios. So I would really like to contribute if there would be a real community site.

> If you have to put something like "newbies" in quotes and talk about them as different than us, you are viewing this community in an unhealthy way.  OmniOS is designed to take Illumos and all of its features and package it in a way that makes a minimal and useful general operating system targeted at servers and appliances.  Anyone with whom that vision aligns is most welcome in the community and we should encourage efforts to make them feel as an accepted part of the whole.

I think the OmniOS community might be small but I would never call it unhealthy and I must confess I like the familiar atmosphere.

One thing why I prefer OmniOS about any other os/distro out there is its focus on minimalism. This is something that totally contradicts with easy accessibility for newbies. However, we as a community could do a better job to pave the way for the more experienced linux/bsd sysadm who wants to dig into OmniOS. This might be to provide a comprehensive guide how to run typical software stacks. This should include how to build from the source, how to package those things and how to run it (smf). 

Although I provide a public OmniOS package server myself. I would never recommend to use omnios just with 3rd party repositories. I think the provided build scripts are a wealthy source of information to build own packages or to do a quick proof of concept but they should for sure not be viewed as the „Missing OmniOS Distribution Packages“. Those packages might be highly customized for someone else very own specific needs.

What I’m getting at, it’s for sure that it would be nice to be more attractive for a broader user base, but all efforts should be in the spirit of the existing OmniOS. Hey, that’s why the existing user base is here in the first place. So let’s educate people on how to use OmniOS to unleash it’s full potential and don’t try to just provide them with easy to use pre-packaged solutions! 

Let me close with a pointer to the scala community. They had a similar problem for a long time, and since they come up with http://docs.scala-lang.org the documentation is constantly improving. I really like this approach of a comprehensive website, containing in-depth guides, easy how-tos for primers and handy cheat-cheats for the daily use. I’m ready to contribute to a great community doc and willing to invest time to build it if others also jump in!

Cheers, Steffen

—
Dr. Steffen Kram                   Ulm University
steffen.kram at uni-ulm.de            Institute for Applied
www.mathematik.uni-ulm.de/iai      Information Processing

Helmholtzstraße 18                 Phone: 0731 50-23575
89081 Ulm, Germany                 Twitter: @stefritz

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