Doth quoth the DaveM

First VirtualBox experience

Yesterday we at Sun announced we are acquiring Innotek and their VirtualBox software. As someone who runs OpenSolaris in a VMware virtual machine on my home PC, I decided to give VirtualBox a try.

As other reviewers have mentioned, the installation package for Windows is quite small, around thirty megabytes or so (yes, I remember when that would be considered large). It installed easily and I was able to start it up and create a new virtual machine to install Solaris in very little time. The virtual machine wizard allows you to select machines for many operating systems, more than VMware.

I then tried installing Solaris Nevada 79a, a preview version of the latest SXDE release. I got to the nice install GUI, it started installing, but somewhere along the line decided it couldn't read the rest of the yet-to-be-installed packages from the DVD. Weird. I didn't try it again, as I had other things to do, but up to that point it was pretty smooth. To be fair, I'm not convinced this is a VirtualBox problem at this point, as I had problems with installs of Solaris Nevada 79 on VMware.

The other thing I found difficult to figure out was how to get 1280x1024 screen resolution. It appears to default to 1024x768 or even smaller, and VirtualBox complained about the 24 bit color depth and suggested I use 32, 16, 8 or 1. It seemed to work anyway, though.

At some point I'll try the install again and give a bit more detail about the various warning and error messages. So far VirtualBox seems okay, but I'm not going to abandon VMware for my personal use at this point.

Posted at 12:46PM Feb 13, 2008 by Dave Marquardt in Solaris  |  Comments[2]

SXDE.next

I've been running Solaris 10 in a VMware virtual machine for several months. This has worked pretty well, and somewhere along the line VMware decided to support the VMware Tools with Solaris 10.

A few months back, Solaris management asked us engineers to test an early, internal version of the next Solaris Express Developer's Edition (SXDE), snv_79. I attempted to install this in a new virtual machine. The installer didn't work in that it failed to partition the disk. On a Sun internal mailing list I heard this has something to do with the disk driver, but that you could install from text installer. Okay, I did that and it worked fine. One other problem is that the VMware Tools don't seem to install correctly, but that's not such a big deal. One final issue I had was getting the hostname set correctly. I set the system up to use DHCP, and I tried various ideas I found in Sun's documentation and on the web, and finally remembered the trick is to put the hostname in /etc/nodename. This was very frustrating. I'll need to write this down, as I must have done this on the Solaris 10 machine earlier.

Last week we were asked to test the respin of the next SXDE, snv_79a. I created another virtual machine and this one installed as advertised. VMware Tools don't install right here either. The installer also set up /etc/nodename, so I didn't have to remember to do that. Very nice! It appears from the internal survey we were asked to fill out that snv_79b is in the works so we have a little more time to go before the next SXDE is released.

For the issue of VMware Tools, VMware open sourced some or all of the tools (I'm not sure) a few months back, so I suppose I could figure this out at some point if I ever care about it. Or just wait and keep trying occasionally until the tools install correctly.

Posted at 03:32PM Jan 23, 2008 by Dave Marquardt in Solaris  | 

Strange interaction of VNC and ssh on recent Nevada build

I recently started using Solaris Nevada (first build 75 and now build 76) rather than Solaris 10 Update 4 on my Ultra-45 at work. I usually have a VNC session to which I connect from home and occasionally from work. But since I converted to using Nevada I've occasionally had xscreensaver tell me that it can't open the display. This makes it impossible to unlock the display and I have to go either kill the VNC server or just kill xscreensaver.

This morning when this happened it finally dawned on me to check my Xauthority file. For some reason I checked the XAUTHORITY environment variable and much to my surprise it pointed to a file in /tmp that didn't exist. Example:

$ echo $XAUTHORITY
/tmp/ssh-xauth-_Raqkq/xauthfile
$ ls -l /tmp/ssh-xauth-_Raqkq/xauthfile
ls: /tmp/ssh-xauth-_Raqkq/xauthfile: No such file or directory
    

Huh, go figure. I realized at this point that I had connected to my work system from my home system using ssh with X forwarding. It appears that at some point the Nevada sshd was changed to use a temporary file for XAUTHORITY, and this change hasn't made it back to S10.

Now I start my VNC sessions by ssh without X forwarding or directly from my desktop X session, where XAUTHORITY is not set. I should probably do something with the env command to set up a known environment, but for now this works.

Posted at 04:42PM Nov 02, 2007 by Dave Marquardt in Solaris  | 

Switching from a local X server to a remote X server

Over the past several months I've come to the conclusion that the old Ultra-60 I have in my office just isn't up to snuff w.r.t. processing power and memory. It has 2 UltraSPARC-II processors running at 450 MHz with 4MB Ecache each, 512 megabytes of memory, and a couple of old disk drives. The good thing is I can keep it updated to the latest bleeding edge internal versions of Solaris. The bad thing is it's slow. Given that we have some other systems around that aren't running at peak capacity, I decided to turn my Ultra-60 into something like an X terminal and run all of my X applications on another system.

One of my big concerns with moving to a remote display and speaker setup is whether I could get audio to work. I've tried it before, but with limited success. But this time, I discovered that someone had finally created a local mirror of a large collection of software packages, and in that collection was rplay. That turned out to solve my problems with using sounds with fvwm2 with FVWM Themes. The other big sound issue was with tkbiff. It turns out that if you install tkbiff on both the server system, where you run the X clients, and the local X server system, a.k.a. the workstation, and tell tkbiff to play audio at some host other than localhost, it will happily use ssh or rsh to invoke tkbiff_audio on that host. Problem solved.

Another piece of the puzzle was how to get the remote system to run my stuff rather than CDE or GNOME. Turns out that if you select GNOME from dtlogin, and you have a $HOME/.xsession program, that .xsession program will be run. Okay, that's good, but my old way of setting up ssh-agent before everything else was when I logged in. How do I do that here? I used keychain to do the work before invoking the window manager:

# Start SSH agent and add keys.
if [ -z "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" ] && [ -x $HOME/bin/keychain ]
then
    SSH_ASKPASS=$HOME/bin/askpass; export SSH_ASKPASS
    $HOME/bin/keychain $HOME/.ssh/id_?sa
    . ~/.keychain/`hostname`-sh
fi

keychain is different from just invoking ssh-agent in that it tried to insure you have only one ssh-agent running on that machine.

Next was getting rplay to work. This required telling fvwm's configure script where to find the rplay library and include file, recompiling, reinstalling, then restarting fvwm. Then it could see that yes, it had rplay available. Okay, cool. But how do I tell rplay to forward everything to my workstation? rplay will try to contact a local rplayd by default. rplayd has a handy -f HOST or --forward=HOST option to tell it to forward all RPLAY packet to HOST. Great, so I ran rplayd like that on the server. Then I ran rplayd on my workstation, after creating an rplayd.conf file that allowed the server system to access the workstation's rplayd. Then I ran rplayd on my workstation, after creating an rplayd.conf file that allowed the server system to access the workstation's rplayd.

So now all the audio is working and all my applications are working. And I'm much happier because my workstation is no longer stressed trying to run Firefox and XEmacs and other things. Instead, those things run on a Sun-Fire-V210, with 2 UltraSPARC-IIIi processors running at 1002MHz with 1MB Ecache each, 2GB RAM, and I'm doing most of my disk stuff from the network. Some applications, like ifile, run in half the time they did before. Great stuff.

Posted at 05:05PM Nov 04, 2005 by Dave Marquardt in Solaris  |  Comments[0]

First Austin OpenSolaris User group meeting held

On Friday we had the first Austin OpenSolaris user group meeting here at the Sun site in Austin. We had about 20 people, which I thought was okay for a Friday night and not a whole lot of notice to the community. Simon Phipps gave an interesting talk about open source and how it makes sense to develop software in communities. Turns out Simon and I were employees at IBM about the same time, which was also interesting.

Al Hopper talked about hardware hacking and Solaris. He raised the point that little PCs are often compared to large SPARC-based servers, which is like comparing apples and oranges. He also had some advice about dealing with PC hardware. One interesting idea is to buy a PC and "weld the cover and file off the bolts" when dealing with PCs, i.e. if something breaks, just replace the box. Another idea was to actually do preventive maintenance on PCs! Now how many of us actually do that? Probably not very many of us.

Teresa Giacomini spoke about OpenSolaris and education, particularly higher education. At one time Solaris was the platform of choice for university research, but with the advent of Linux which was free and quite readily available, most research work is done on Linux. One thing OpenSolaris is trying to do is get (Open)Solaris back into the universities, both by being free and by being innovative. And there's at least some evidence this is working.

We also had some Q&A with Simon and Al, both CAB members, about governance. Mostly about the charter and the governance model. OpenSolaris doesn't have a charter yet, but will soon. Then the community can come up with the governance model.

All in all, I thought it was a good first meeting. I hope we can get more people to the meeting next time, by earlier notice and by avoiding meeting on Friday night!

Posted at 02:13PM Oct 24, 2005 by Dave Marquardt in Solaris  |  Comments[0]

First Austin OpenSolaris User Group meeting

We're forming an Austin OpenSolaris User Group, and having our first meeting on Friday, October 21, 2005. Here are the details:

WHEN:	Friday, October 21, 2005, 6:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. or so.
WHERE:	Sun Microsystems
	5300 Riata Park Court
	Austin, TX 78727
AGENDA:	6 p.m. – Welcome
	6:15 p.m. – The Zen of Open by Simon Phipps
	6:45 p.m. – OpenSolaris for Hardware Hackers by Al Hopper
	7:30 p.m. – OpenSolaris and Education by Teresa Giacomini
	8:00 p.m. – OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board (Simon and Al): governance model and contributor agreement
	8:15 p.m. – Q&A, meet and greet
	9:00 p.m. – Get out

If you're going to attend, please contact me at Dave.Marquardt@Sun.COM so I can get you cleared in advance by our security folks, and get a conference room big enough for all of us.

Posted at 01:58PM Oct 12, 2005 by Dave Marquardt in Solaris  |  Comments[0]