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...

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.

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!

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

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 :-)