Trying to figure out what to write about illumos is difficult, because for me personally, the entire experience has been pretty terrible from start to finish.
That said, I really don't want to shit on a project that appears to be struggling with commercial support, and frankly, I'm not exactly playing to its strengths.
As I'm using it, its basically still just SVR4 UNIX, and I'm ignoring the advancements based in ZFS, Dtrace, etc.
@Toasterson I will note that I spent most of last night in #illumos helping solve a login crash when bash was the default shell.
I have also debugging GCC, and written compiler patches in the past. I do infact know what I am doing, and its insulting that you'd just assume otherwise.
The attitude you just showed up with is how you make people decide to never contribute to a project again.
@jmc I simply installed OmniOS, and didn't do any other configuration besides that.
That bug is exactly what happened to me, I changed my shell to /bin/bash and couldn't log in. I switched it back to ksh93.
I can dig up the core files.
I did get on IRC, but I'm mostly running a laptop, and I'm not going to setup a bouncer just to spend time in #illumos, and well, this was already reported, and there hasn't been action on it.
Reading this Essay today makes me want a couple more featues in #illumos SMF. MacOSX is really a different beast of an OS with interesting capabilities all blocked because it is proprietary. #freebsd might had some looks into OSX too?
There are almost 1400 software packages in Tribblix (in addition to the 500-odd packages in illumos itself). If each piece of software just did 1 release a year, then that's about 4 updates a day, a constant stream of updates.
In practice releases are more frequent on average. I seem to be averaging 10 commits a day to the main build repo. Fortunately most are trivial version bumps, which keeps the effort low.
Does anyone have any recommendations for a good VPS with IPv6, the option to run one of #FreeBSD , #NetBSD , #OpenBSD or some #Illumos and cheap low tiers? Literally only need one core, 1-2GB ram and 10GB storage or something along those lines and preferably amd64 or arm64. (OCI is out already, since they refuse to let me create an account. And AWS, Azure and google cloud I'd preferably avoid)
Also yes, I'm totally fine if you suggest a service you work for/you own, just be transparent about it ^^
Tonight, I helped find a bug in libreadline, that required looking to the actual POSIX specification to determine what, if anything, is the sane thing to do if your locale is broken.
This is not the YouTube video I expected to make, but I just uttered the following in #illumos:
[2:50:09 AM] <NCommander> This is getting fairly close the eldritch tomes of lore that AT&T used to forge the One Ring deep in the heart of Murray Hill
People frequently say they don’t want #ZFS on their workstation because it’s a server FS. But what’s the best workstation FS? #UFS, #Ext4, #HAMMER, #Btrfs, #XFS? What’s the going benchmark workload look like? What subjective aspects matter too? (And yes, I know about damned lies of https://fsbench.filesystems.org/)
Got my #illumos braich image running on the #RaspberryPi, uart pins connected through the official debug probe, and am playing around with screen to talk to the serial console before I dig into minicom. I hadn’t realized how deep this rabbit hole goes. But I really want to understand how to get a minimal term wired to VGA.
But now that I have a working testbed, I have to be able to compile my own image. Guess I’m going to have to track down my missing header warnings.
Come and help us maintain and enhance a fully open-source operating system and cloud stack that has been battle-tested in very large production environments.
There are plenty of interesting problems to solve, all the way from writing device drivers and debugging early boot issues, to writing new UIs in Rust.
I think we're a pretty friendly team to work alongside too ;)
I don't know what it is about #OmniOS (or probably any #Illumos distribution), but it just feels right. I know this is really vague, but that's the best description I could come up with. I just boot it up and immediately get the feeling of "yes, this is it, this is how it should be".