Submitted by An often-heard complaint when it comes to Solaris is that its installation takes a long time. Apparantly, work is under way to fix it. “While in a chatroom this morning I learned the reason why Solaris installs are so slow. It turns out that pkgadd is really slow on installing small packages, well it turns out that Solaris installs about 10000 little packages in a full install.”
You also need at least 512 MB for a faster install. 256 MB will install, but significantly slower. And god help you if your computer has unsupported hardware. An unsupported NIC, CD/DVD, or video card can lead to a system install hang. Or at least several minutes before it times out.
Very often you have the time to install the system, and really, it doesn´t take THAT much time.
I know, you will prob. say that an administrator does not have the time when an sytem crashes. No, they don´t, that is why they have an dump or jumpstart CD to speed it up a little bit.
Also, i think that people only compares it to Linux for example, why compare it. Be happy that it installs and that you can use it and that it is very stable when installed.
And, AndrewZ, it has never slowed down on y machines because it found Hardware that was not supported, it just didn´t install them.
It feels that every comment tree for every article on osnews has some kind of whining from people.
Enable DMA. Solaris goes from installing slowly to rather quickly.
http://www.sun.drydog.com/faq/s86faq.html#4.13
I’m not sure if this is still true for Sol10, as I no longer install from CD when possible.
By default Solaris 10 enables DMA if the devices support it.
We can jumpstart a 4GB flash archive in 1 hour.
You’re doing something wrong.
I am using a Blade 100 with 2 GB of RAM and an 80 GB disk to Flash Install V100’s with anywhere between 1024 and 1152 MB of RAM and 2 40 GB disks and a 3.36 GB uncompressed archive is taking about 20 minutes.
I’m not whining, I’m bitching. And I’m bitching because I have tried to install Solaris 11 about 10 times at least on various PC configurations. I have had it hang many times, and have probably spent about 20 hours of install jiggering. I can tell you straight out that compared to Linux (red hat), Windows, and BeOS, the Solaris install is very unforgiving.
I have also talked to Solaris support engineers who have said that even if a general device is listed on the HCL that doesn’t mean it is supported. In my case it was a SIG SATA card. Although the chip was a match it was not detected by the Solaris install, and the Solaris tech could not make it work. I was out of luck.
Admittedly I have pushed the edge of what is considered supported, but it would be nice to not have the install hang like it does.
I can give various hardware configurations if anyone is interested.
That being said I think Solaris has a lot going for it. I just think the install could be more forgiving and less error prone. Like the installation for Linux (red hat), Windows, and BeOS (long live BeOS 😉 )
I have Ultra10 (440MHZ US-IIi model) and a Dell Inspiron 8200 notebook(Pentium 4 Mobile at 1600MHz) and average the same time installing Solaris 10 (both IDE disks and 512Mb RAM). The Ultra10 is a bit lite slowly than Pentium4 Mobile, but five/ten minutes (1:55min average).
But this sucks, a long time installing full OS… The installer is not very friendly and I can say that this is from MS-DOS times. I think that the installer needs change system packaging to something similar such pkg-get.
I’m dreaming with Gentoo/portage packe system in the future with OpenSolaris too 🙂
Sorry for my lite english, It’s very easy to understand reading but not for reading 😉
First the Ultra 10 does not support DMA transfers since the controller (CMD 604 I think) only supports PIO modes. And which release of Solaris 10 are you using, because 3/05 did not auto enable DMA (it had to be patched)?
And which installer are you using, the graphical or text mode? I don’t understand what is so difficult about asking a few questions, it is no different than a RedHat install using anaconda. The installer might look different, but they both ask essentially the same questions.
It’s very easy to understand reading but not for WRITING 😛
I agree with the fact of DMA, it’s enabled by default in both DVD and CDRW drives from my notebook. I don’t known it in my SPARC, but rans OK…
Regards
I don’t think you understand what a Flash Install is, you take a system that is completely built and you create an archive using flarcreate. You then take that archive and place it on an existing JumpStart server and modify the JumpStart profile for the machine in question to accomodate a Flash Install rather than a JumpStart installation.
In order to do this you need a machine set up as a JumpStart server, this is what I use my Ultra 10 at home for and a Blade 100 at work.
Robert, this is Solaris Express from December 05 (12/05 I think), not just Solaris 10… The Inspiron’s hardware is very compatible with Solaris 10 (Express and Release) 100% in HCL
Graphical mode and interactive installation (full OS plus OEM)
Thank you for the info for the DMA in SPARC 🙂
Cheers!
Actually, you could have just used the Full Distribution installation without any problems. The Full + OEM is for specific hardware (Fujitsu for SPARC and if I am not mistaken HP/Compaq for x86).
The slowness comes from constantly updating a central package list for each package install.
If you install a package that consists of a single shell script, you must read, update, sort, and write this list.
If you install a package that is 10GB of files, you have to update this list.
If you have 2 packages on the system, this is not a problem. If you have 10,000 packages, it IS a problem.
If you’re doing an install from a Flash or Jumpstart, you don’t HAVE this problem, as the packages are already installed and you’re simply moving files and updating some configuration files.
The simple point is that this is a legacy system (the pkg-add system) dating from the late 80’s or early 90’s that’s never really been updated (at least in terms of its storage mechanism or central directory format), and since most serious users of Solaris DO use Jumpstart and/or Flash archives, in practical, real world use, it’s mostly a non-issue.
But when you suddenly have a million people, all installing it the first time, or who don’t plan to have jumpstart servers handy, it raises its ugly head.
I read it and I see it mostly on SPARC installs with older hardware (my E3000 and Ultra 10). On most modern hardware (SPARC and x86) I don’t see much of an issue, it installs fast enough for my taste (DVD installs). Admittedly it is not as fast as RedHat Enterprise Linux (our resident RHCT wastes no time in pointing that out to us), but it really doesn’t matter.
To the newbies it is a concern, but I don’t judge an OS by how fast it installs.
“If you’re doing an install from a Flash or Jumpstart, you don’t HAVE this problem, as the packages are already installed and you’re simply moving files and updating some configuration files”
I think you mean Jumpstart install with flash archive.
Jumpstart Install and Flash Install are two different things, and not necessarily related. Jumpstart install is about how the information needed for install are collected and processed. For end users/admins, it means no user interaction is needed during the Install. Flash Install, however, is about how the install contents are stored and delivered – flash archive is one way, another way is the DVD image, which is probably used more often from my guess.
So one can combine many different permutations for Solaris Install, for example:
– Interactive install with DVD image
– Interactive install with flash archive file
– Jumpstart install with DVD image
– Jumpstart install with flash archive file
– the list goes on(eg, ftp, http, etc)
If one Jumpstart installs a system with DVD image, Solaris install still needs to take the effort to maintain the package information on the system.
Here are a few more points of constructive criticism re: Solaris install.
The installation requires a certain non-trivial grasp of various Solaris internals. Not the least of which is choosing which of the four installation methods you want. Too bad to can’t click on Help and get information on which one is appropriate for your use.
In fact there are several points in the install where there is actually a help button, but you get an error message if you haven’t established network connectivity when you click.
It would be nice to know what you need to understand in order to perform a correct install. Since you don’t know what you need to know you just end up feeling stupid. Some might say this is appropriate 8-), I say that’s not going to provide a very good “out of the box” experience for the many one-time people who try to install Solaris. It’s not good usability.
Have you tried docs.sun.com?
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0544
EVERYTHING sun makes is slow.
…….SLOWLARIS.
I have used Sun HW and SW since SunOS 412.
They are well made, conservative, reliable and slowwwwwww