Tuesday Sep 23, 2008
I previously blogged about getting
NMH from the Solaris Companion web site. I went to the web site
again and read further down the page and noticed there was a IPS
repository. This is easier for OpenSolaris than downloading a
package and then adding it. Here are the steps I followed to
install gnuplot:
pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.sunfreeware.com:9000/ sunfreeware.com
pfexec pkg refresh
pfexec pkg install IPSFWgplot
Works great.
Monday Sep 22, 2008
One of the things missing when you install OpenSolaris in a
VMware virtual machine is audio. Apparently the driver for the
audio device that VMware emulates isn't redistributable, so it
isn't included as part of OpenSolaris.
To solve this, I grabbed a copy of the Open Sound System
drivers package
and followed the installation
instructions. After a reboot, I had sound.
Monday Sep 22, 2008
Last week I blogged about OpenSolaris
BE and build names. Another way to accomplish this is on
your next image update. Create an OpenSolaris boot
environment, mount it, update it, unmount it, and activate it.
This is steps 4 through 9 of Updating
Your System to OpenSolaris Development Builds.
Friday Sep 19, 2008
Yesterday I mentioned that I needed to install MH or NMH on my
home OpenSolaris virtual machine. I took at look at the Sunfreeware site and
discovered NMH is part of the Sun
Companion CD Project. I grabbed the Solaris package from
there and installed it with pkgadd. Nice and
quick, works great.
Friday Sep 19, 2008
I updated my laptop running OpenSolaris from build 97 to build
98 yesterday. No issues at all. Gotta go update at home too.
Thursday Sep 18, 2008
Last night I finally threw the switch and migrated my main
virtual machine at home from Solaris Express snv_79 to
OpenSolaris. Well, actually, I finally had the new OpenSolaris
virtual machine ready and the data migrated so I could power off
the Solaris Express virtual machine.
I still have a few missing pieces left to deal with. First, I
need to get tkbiff
installed. I also need MH or NMH. I've
used MH and later NMH on and off for many years. It provides
command line tools to scan folders, send mail, sort mail, burst
digests, and more. Now I use Gnus within XEmacs, but I'm on one
mailing list that only comes in digest form, and I used the
MH burst command to break the digests apart into
single e-mail messages. I also occasionally use the MH
scan command to quickly scan a folder for an item of
interest, particularly if I don't have XEmacs running. It's
much quicker to run scan than to start XEmacs and then
Gnus within XEmacs.
The other item of interest is that I'm finally migrating away
from fvwm2 with fvwm-themes to GNOME. I started using GNOME a
few months ago when Sun gave me a laptop and told me to run
OpenSolaris. I've grown to like it well enough, though I miss a
few of fvwm's capabilities. But now my work and home
environments will be more similar, and that's more efficient for
me. I've gotten more used to the GNOME mouse clicks and have
found they just don't work with my FVWM setup! :)
Thursday Sep 18, 2008
I recently read a thread on one of the OpenSolaris mailing lists
about how BE (boot environment) names don't reflect anything
about the OpenSolaris build it contains. It occurred to me that
since pkg image-update finds a BE named
opensolaris-N and then creates a new
BE named opensolaris-N+1, you could
rename your current BE
opensolaris-buildnumber and pkg
image-update would "just do it". This only works if
you upgrade at every build. If you don't, the number gets off,
but you can fix that by renaming BEs or by creating BEs for the
missing builds with the appropriate names.
Having done all this, my system shows this for BEs:
BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
-- ------ ---------- ----- ------ -------
opensolaris-96 - - 37.92M static 2008-09-05 10:14
opensolaris-97 - - 18.31M static 2008-09-11 15:59
opensolaris-98 NR / 13.78G static 2008-09-18 11:36
Wednesday Aug 27, 2008
Some weeks back, my manager gave me a HP Compaq 8510p laptop to
use, on condition that I install OpenSolaris, use it, and report
problems. Sounded good to me, so I grabbed it.
Over the past several weeks, I've gotten OpenSolaris and various
tools I use installed and working nicely, and was pretty
productive on the laptop. I figured out how to hook up and use
the 24.1 inch monitor here at work[1],
figured out how to customize the system using NWAM (NetWork
Auto-Magic). Everything was going good.
I turned on my laptop on Sunday, and it gave me a grub>
prompt. Oh oh. GRUB couldn't see anything. I thought
maybe the laptop had taken a hard knock on a trip to downtown
Austin on Saturday morning. Even scarier, I tried to recover
using an OpenSolaris 2008.05 LiveCD I had around, but it gave me
errors. At first I thought the errors were something seriously
wrong with the system, but on closer inspection, noticed it was
complaining about a bad sector on the CD. So I burned another
CD, and it started fine. The OpenSolaris from the new copy of
the LiveCD could see the partitions, but it couldn't access the
ZFS pool on hard disk. At this point, I gave up and
re-installed OpenSolaris 2008.05 from the CD. That went fine.
But during the install, I recalled that I had seen this when
looking at the ZFS pool using zpool status on Friday:
pool: rpool
state: ONLINE
status: The pool is formatted using an older on-disk format. The pool can
still be used, but some features are unavailable.
action: Upgrade the pool using 'zpool upgrade'. Once this is done, the
pool will no longer be accessible on older software versions.
scrub: none requested
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
rpool ONLINE 0 0 0
c5t0d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
I had gone ahead and upgraded rpool. Hmm, could this be it? I
then recalled reading something on some OpenSolaris e-mail list
about this, where GRUB couldn't read the latest ZFS format, or
if it could, you needed to update GRUB on the disk. There's an
e-mail
thread that discusses this. It turns out I *might* have
been able to recover, had I had a nv94 or higher CD
So the moral of that story is to make sure you know what you're
doing before upgrading a root ZFS pool. Also, make backups of
system configuration information and scripts!
After I installed, I knew I'd need a few things to be
productive:
- Sun Studio Express
- OpenOffice
- Punchin
- XEmacs
- tkbiff
- NWAM scripts
Sun Studio Express and OpenOffice were easy to get, I just
grabbed them using from the IPS repository by using pkg
install .... Punchin was a chicken and egg problem, in
that I had to get punched in to get the packages. Fortunately,
I have a Solaris Express VMware virtual machine on my home PC,
and used that to punchin and grab the packages, then used scp to
copy the packages and credentials to the laptop.
tkbiff was trivial. XEmacs was a bit more involved, though I
was surprised how little it took to get it built and working.
Turns out I remembered a few things from the first time around.
I wanted to use the old X Athena widgets, but the header files
disappeared from OpenSolaris several builds ago. But IPS lets
you install old versions of packages, so I figured out which
package and the version I needed and installed it.
NWAM has been more interesting, and is one area where I really
wish I'd saved a backup copy of the scripts. Grr. You can
write a script that NWAM invokes when there's a change in the
system's network interfaces, and from that you can return a
name. NWAM invokes bringup and teardown scripts associated with
that name. So my typical way of working is wireless at home and
wired at work. When I'm at work, I use NIS, at home, I don't.
Sadly, I'm still working on getting these right, and when I do,
I'll write up another blog entry about them.
Footnotes:
[1] If the monitor is connected and plugged in when Xorg starts,
it just works, but it drivers the laptop display at 1920x1200,
which the laptop doesn't support. So I use xrandr --output LVDS
--off to make it work.
Wednesday Feb 13, 2008
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.
Wednesday Jan 23, 2008
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.
Friday Nov 02, 2007
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.
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I do the same thing! :)
If only the updates were m...
I've found the updates I've installed to be reliab...