Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 26th Jun 2007 11:50 UTC, submitted by Michael
"There's a problem with Solaris and Sun knows it. The installation experience of Solaris (along with other areas) could be greatly improved. The installer doesn't 'suck' as it's easy and known to Solaris administrators, but for a Linux or Windows user it could prove to be a bit challenging. For those of you that have never tried out Solaris, what we've decided to do is to show you this 'usability gap' with the installation process in Solaris compared to Linux. Is the experience really that bad?"
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Member since:
2007-06-26
Interesting however, you missed a few critical distinctions.
First of all, there's the obvious question of intended audience. For the serious SysAdmin there are typically two ways on installing Solaris.
1) JumpStart - can't be beat once you know what kind of image you want. JumpStart is the norm in most enterprise Solaris installatons.
2) Text-mode installer - since you aren't always running on a headed system anytime you have to do an install and you can't use JumpStart, then text-only mode is your friend.
Now switch audiences and look at your developers and casual users. This is an audience that Sun REALLY wants to win back. For these folks you can fairly say that the graphical installer SUCKS. The Solaris development team knows it. Jonathan is keen to win back developers and he knows it.
Finally, as for comparisons, look at how Apple and Ubuntu have chosen to implement their installers. IMHO this is the way to go for the developer / casual user audience.
Anyway, my 2¢.
Cheers!