Wednesday, November 26, 2008

My first spec file commit

Took me long enough :-)
It builds, so I'm happy, not that much of a contribution, but still a contribution!

$ svn ci --username XXX patches/dynamips-01-makefile.diff copyright/SF>
Authentication realm: SourceForge Subversion area
Password for 'XXX':
Adding SFEdynamips.spec
Adding copyright/SFEdynamips.copyright
Adding patches/dynamips-01-makefile.diff
Transmitting file data ...
Committed revision 1528.

Monday, October 06, 2008

snv_98 on the EEE 701

I don't have any huge drives to perform a pkg image-update so I took the easy route and just performed a backup of my data popped in a USB DVD drive and booted OpenSolaris current (snv_98).

After installation I still got some errors:
  • Still have to add -v to boot options
  • Power status reports problems about an old battery
  • Stumped into a problem while trying to perform a search which went away after performing a package remove:
    $ pkg search NVIDIA
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "/usr/bin/pkg", line 1958, in ?
    ret = main_func()
    File "/usr/bin/pkg", line 1930, in main_func
    return search(img, pargs)
    File "/usr/bin/pkg", line 916, in search
    searches.append(img.local_search(pargs, case_sensitive))
    File "/usr/lib/python2.4/vendor-packages/pkg/client/image.py", line 1738, in local_search
    res = qe.search(query, self.gen_installed_pkg_names())
    File "/usr/lib/python2.4/vendor-packages/pkg/client/query_engine.py", line 59, in search
    matched_ids, res = self.search_internal(query)
    File "/usr/lib/python2.4/vendor-packages/pkg/query_engine.py", line 158, in search_internal
    assert ((term == tok) or
    AssertionError
    pkg: This is an internal error. Please let the developers know about this
    problem by filing a bug at http://defect.opensolaris.org and including the
    above traceback and this message. The version of pkg(5) is '1b1547cb8655'.

The disk was quite full (4GB) after installation, so I started to remove some software drivers I would never use, note that removing some of these don't add up to much space:
$ pfexec pkg uninstall NVDAgraphics pkg:/slim_install pkg:/babel_install
$ pfexec pkg uninstall pkg:/SUNWatigfx
$ pfexec pkg uninstall pkg:/BRCMbnx pkg:/SUNWbge pkg:/SUNWvia823x pkg:/SUNWnvsata pkg:/SUNWmegasas pkg:/SUNWnge pkg:/SUNWiwk pkg:/SUNWwpi pkg:/SUNWnxge pkg:/SUNWpcwl pkg:/SUNWrge
$ pkg search wireless| sed -e '1d' | awk '{ print $4 }'| xargs pfexec pkg uninstall

To get audio working you need audiohd from here

A new atheros driver is needed, download it from here:
$ pfexec /usr/sbin/pkgadd -d ~/Download/driver/SUNWatheros

One particular network returned:
Oct 3 20:22:59 nargothrond nwamd[717]: [ID 134467 daemon.error] failed to read zenity output

So I had to do a:
$ pfexec svcadm disable -t nwam
$ pfexec svcadm enable -t physical:default
$ pfexec dladm connect-wifi -e LAB-UBP
$ pfexec ifconfig ath0 auto-dhcp

Back to removing unnecessary software, I don't use thunderbird so:
$ ls /var/pkg/pkg/|grep thund|xargs pfexec pkg uninstall

The screen is too small for desklets:
$ pfexec pkg uninstall SUNWgnome-desklets

No need for accessibility for me (yet):
$ pfexec pkg uninstall pkg:/SUNWgnome-a11y-dasher
$ pfexec pkg uninstall pkg:/SUNWgnome-a11y-gok
$ pfexec pkg uninstall pkg:/SUNWgnome-a11y-reader

No need for i18n:
$ pfexec pkg uninstall pkg:/SUNWiiimf

Removing the package manager gui:
$ pfexec pkg uninstall pkg:/SUNWipkg-gui

Destroying the @install pools adds up into more space:
$ pfexec zfs destroy rpool/ROOT/opensolaris@install
$ pfexec zfs destroy rpool/ROOT@install
$ pfexec zfs destroy rpool@install

Suspend to ram is working fine with this configuration.

Monday, September 22, 2008

puppet ebook and digital reading

I've been playing with puppet... well, it may actually go into production (lab production that is) so playing might not be that accurate. As usual I found myself fooling around the web and ran into this which I yet haven't listened to. Anyhow in the comments I saw someone talk about a book he wrote published on Apress. I followed the link, and as an impulse and because I never bought an ebook before, I decided to purchase it and check it out. The book in question is titled "Pulling Strings with Puppet: Configuration Management Made Easy".

I thought I didn't like to read ebooks, but somehow the feeling is quite different when the actual artifact was a purchased one. The value one inadvertently gives to such things astonishes me.

I'm also subscribed to the IEEE and rather read what is provided over digital media, but constantly look over what I get in print. I guess it is more related to the feeling and ease when skipping pages and going back and forth. I value that a lot, too bad it doesn't feel so good when you think about the trees at stake...

Friday, August 29, 2008

Having to learn Solaris on a platform different than Solaris

During the JRSL08 I attended a lecture sponsored by Sun. The lecturer handed out, together with an opensolaris CD, some brochures or sheets of paper as I like to call them with some info to access Sun's Academic Initiative (SAI), in other words, access to the courseware in order to learn Solaris to get certified or just learn (link).

I created my account a few days ago, added some courses to my learning plan and moved on to my usual work. Today I decided to try out a course in my plan only to see that accessing a random course brings Firefox down, after two other attempts and figuring out it wasn't some random thing I went on to the technical support section to find out that my patform wasn't supported.

So my computer is reported as a SunOS, more precisely:

$ uname -a
SunOS nargothrond 5.11 snv_93 i86pc i386 i86pc Solaris


So these are the platforms that skillsoft supports:

Microsoft

SkillSoft e-Learning solutions are supported on the following Microsoft Operating Systems.

  • Microsoft Windows NT 4.0
  • Microsoft Windows 2000
  • Microsoft Windows XP
  • Microsoft Windows Vista

Apple Macintosh OSX

SkillSoft has only tested using Mac OS X version 10.4. While you may be able to play SkillSoft content with later versions, to ensure full compatibility, SkillSoft recommends this version.

Linux

SkillSoft has only tested the KDE and GNOME desktops using SuSe Linux version 9.0, 9.1 and 10.0. While you may be able to play SkillSoft content with other versions, to ensure full compatibility, SkillSoft recommends one of these versions.


That sucks big time, no Solaris and look at what it says about Apple and Linux... I'm going to try and update flash and then Firefox to three dot o and see if that does the trick....

Friday, August 22, 2008

Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre


So here I am quite alone at the JRSL in Buenos Aires. I've met some interesting people. On the first day I probably listened to all of Dag Wieers' talks and looked for him in between to talk some more.
I also chit chatted with Christoph Hellwig and commented about Intel being in Cordoba, he sounded quite interested until I mentioned that we work on services there.
One of the greatest talks was on Thursday, by maddog, it was quite impressive, there was live streaming, so I guess there'll be a video out any time, anyone who couldn't see it should check it out.
I also go my picture taken with maddog :-)

Well I'm off to maddog's next talk...

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

opensolaris on the eee

After getting my 2[GB} RAM module I've decided to turn my eee which had xubuntu into an opensolaris carrier. I went with the snv_93 snapshot.

Problems found where the usual ones, keyboard did not work, plugging in a USB keyboard and unplugging it made the integrated keyboard work. To avoid this I read somewhere that making Solaris boot in debug mode (verbose '-v'), made the issue go away. So now I have some detailed boot up messages and a working keyboard. I wonder how much overhead that could cause.

Sound's working thanks to OSS, wireless works thanks to this driver.
I haven't tried the camera, the wired network isn't working, suspend failed and I can't install any big package onto the system (due to limited space).

What I'd like to get working are the special keys, I'll have to investigate and see if someone's done it already or move on and see if I can work on it myself. Getting the webcam to work isn't a priority of mine since I used it for skyping and since skype is not available for solaris yet, I don't have any motivation to walk that walk. I still need to configure the touchpad to get scrolling on the go.

Leaving that aside, all in all, I'm quite happy. So now I need space on my eee which only has 4[GiB], what else to do in the rush:


$ for i in `zfs list -t snapshot | grep -v NAME|awk '{print $1 }'`; do pfexec zfs destroy "${i}"; done
$ df -h|head -3
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rpool/ROOT/opensolaris
2.8G 2.4G 372M 87% /

I'm still short on space failing to install things. I'll see if I can get around this somehow, some other day...

Sunday, June 01, 2008

On the opensolaris bandwagon

So I just spent the last couple of hours getting Opensolaris 200805 on my PC. I previously had SXCE on, build 81 I think. The move was not as straightforward as I would've liked, then again, it can be blamed entirely on myself since I did not read the Release Notes.

On my first try, I got my USB pen thingy and used the tool provided to copy over what was on the live CD onto my pen drive. So the USB pen drive was my first input into trying to install. Well, I couldn't even get the live system to load, which was good because I forgot to export my zfs filesystem which was not on my Solaris partition in order in re import it cleanly on the new install.

So I just moved on to the livecd, popped up the gui-install app and was on my way, chose the current partitining got to 99% and it just stalled there. So I restarted...

... and on my last try (many omitted), I just deleted my Solaris partition, my primary Linux Swap partition and created a new Solaris 2 partition on top of both. I also destroyed the rpool zfs that was lying around and got it to install.

Right now I'm installing openoffice, sunstudioexpress and netbeans with ips. While waiting for it to finish I went on and was going to re setup my cbe environment as I had in SXCE to build some applications out of the spec files provided.

I was going to document that but found this http://blogs.sun.com/dhollister/entry/solaris_vs_audacity, so if it works, great, if not I'll document the differences.

While I waited I also created a sourceforge accout with the intent of contributing some spec files. I hope I can live up to my own expectations and do it.

Saturday, May 31, 2008

Preparandose para el futuro

Los chicos de tele 2001 me llevaron a ver un film llamado *Zeitgeist*, la verdad es que me sorprende las porquerias que se ven en este mundo. Tambien ha logrado de que me cuestione muchas cosas sobre como vivimos ahora, asi como tambien alentar el hecho de que, en general, nadie sabe lo que quiere y es guiado a pensar que lo sabe. Estaremos proximos a 1984 (Big Brother)? O es que ya estamos ahi y mejorando la supervision? En los tiempos actuales, ver el gran hermano (mucha gente que conozco lo ve), sera una preparacion a lo que se viene?

La impotencia a todo esto me deja demasiado triste, quiza no todas las cosas en ese film sean ciertas o todo sea una exageracion de la realidad. En definitiva, lo unico que quedan son puntos de vista. Y este es un punto que me gustaria explorar, en su lugar, las ambiciones y objetivos serian similares?

Espero creer que no. Donde esta el bien contra el mal al cual tanto me aferro? Hay tanto mal que el bien es opacado.

En el trabajo me suceden cosas similares, nos preguntamos con un amigo siempre de porque no podemos ser mas simples y solo hacer lo que debemos hacer sin cuestionar tanto las cosas.


En fin aqui esta el video http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/main.htm, dura dos horas asi que busquense un lugar comodo y tiempo para verlo. Mas abajo estan los subtitulos en castellano (en el link que dice Spanish, o bueno, aqui)

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

media effects upon a good thing

This video snips through Sputnik and what evolved around it. The video also shows how disinformation can cause bad secondary effects.



There a lot of interesting videos on that site, you should check them out!

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Arthur C. Clarke

It's rare how someone you don't know can make you feel so gloomy. Clarke's one of those people I have never met if ever through his books and experience regarding geostationary orbits and related topics. Laika introduced me to his work and I'm ever so grateful for that.

Today I got the goosebumps after learning that he has passed away. May he rest in peace...

Update: http://spectrum.ieee.org/mar08/6075

Sunday, March 02, 2008

usual reading

So as usual, I've been reading all these geek sites I usually read and stepped into this and thought I'd record it in memory.

http://jaboutboul.blogspot.com/2008/02/fedora-on-final-frontier.html

The main buzz in this is the talk about Fedora in Nasa, it seems it is used a lot, not something I expected for production, much less mission critical stuff where lives are involved. But hey, it looks like my perception was wrong and Fedora (together with RHEL, Solaris and Suse) does have enough confidence to do this job.

Some comments from the blog post, not strictly related to NASA but more to where Fedora is used in other places include sayings such as:


Nathan said...
I work at JPL and basically anyone who is doing serious scientific work has a box that runs some variant of Linux. It's typical for management types to have OSX machines, but I've only encountered a few Windows boxes on lab ever.


Vegard said...
I work in the Royal Norwegian Navy, and we're using Fedora as our primary computer system for the whole simulation and training building :)


Noah said...
I'm at GSFC. I admin about 20 RHEL, 2 Fedora, 1 CENTOS, 3 OSX, 1 Windows box.


Nathan's post is really aligned with my line of thought, that's why I copied it here :-)

Language shift

So here I am writing once more, I've decided to switch to English, the why is not specific to any particular reason other than because I feel like it.

This is going to be really short... it ends here :-)