James C. Liu's Weblog

Saturday October 13, 2007

pre-OpenSolaris-Summit Santa Cruz Wharf Fishing

Got up early this Saturday morning to head south to attend the OpenSolaris Summit. It's being hosted at the UC Santa Cruz campus during this weekend which is a change over traditional schedules and venues that would eat into normal office time during the work week. Plus, it's a chance for Sun and a number of prominent OpenSolaris community members to talk about a the future of OpenSolaris.

The UCSC campus isn't very far from the Santa Cruz Wharf. One of my proposed sessions was to do some fishing. And this would be open to all participants since there is no license needed on public saltwater piers in California. My target was to get there around 6:30am and then move out along the pier towards the end to wet a line or two until about 8:30am when we'd need to head over to the campus to start the conference.

And from the picture above, it wasn't all skunk. We did catch a large variety of fish - Jack smelt, kingfish, staghorn sculpin, and shiner perch. I'm seriously thinking, as I sit in the conference about more fishing later this evening.

Topics Discussed Today

The Summit will cover today a State of the Nation for OpenSolaris and specifically, the Project called 'Indiana.' This is a proposal to produce a branded Solaris version that is based on Nevada but completely open source and has improved packaging, install, and support for more types of x86/x64 systems.

So far, there hasn't been any all out fighting one might expect in Open Source debate. On the contrary, we've covered a lot of packaging and installation concepts. Some are borrowed from ideas and concepts used in Linux already or other open source. The primary goals are to make packaging more intuitive, higher performance, and easier to use.

I can't say I disagree with any of the ideas. I'm sure they have value. But I also can't help but think that there are major issues with the missing application that clearly hinder adoption more (or lack thereof of those apps hinders adoption). But install/update and packaging are, in general, a lower priority for me. I don't believe that people are constantly updating their OS, especially in Solaris. My impression is that people update OS as security requires and as their IT shops require them to do so. Otherwise, they run oblivious to updates.

And from working with software vendors, many decide on an OS version and stick with it and support it. For us to focus too much on install/update isn't the most optimal use of resources, IMO. But I might be swayed otherwise if a valid argument is made.

I guess I'll learn more as the afternoon goes on. October 13, 2007 03:47 PM PDT Permalink

Lower cost wifi solutions for Solaris x86

Airlink 101 - AWLC 4130 and AWLC3026

I picked up a few cheapy Airlink 101 AWLC 4130 cards recently at Fry's on sale. Cardbus cards for laptops with a PCMCIA slot. They were only $14 each, limit 2 per person. Unfortunately a 1 day sale only.

But these were plug and play with Solaris Nevada. The AWLC4130 is advertised as a "Super G" with Atheros chipset. And indeed, when we plug it in, the PCI DevID confirms it's a AR 5212/5213 series chipset, which has been supported by the Solaris 'ath' driver for quite a while.

I also decided to look in my spare parts bin and pull out some older AWLC3026 pc cards. These are regular 802.11G. Back about a year ago, I picked them up for $9 ea at Fry's as well. But there was no driver for the Marvell/Libertas chipset. But on a whim, I decided to check the OpenSolaris.ORG website and found the 'malo' driver.

It's currently provided as a source distribution only, but it compiled just great, and after just a couple of issues with rebooting correctly a couple of times, I was able to get the driver to load and function quite well and fairly stably.

Most laptops do come with WiFi today, but the chipset may not have any drivers yet, or use an NDIS wrapper type driver that isn't stable. I'm using the AWLC4130 now on my el cheapo Toshiba M115 laptop with still unsupported Atheros 5006 mini-pcie WiFi. Not a bad deal for just $14, or even better, $9 for the regular G version AWLC3026.

I know Airlink 101 makes quite a few regular PCI adapters that turn workstations into wifi workstations. I'm waiting for a sale now to get a few to find out their chipset as well. I've been searching for some low cost cards to refurbish cheap PCs to give away to needy families with kids attending my elementary school who don't have broadband today but would want to leverage free city wide wireless that is now available in our neighbourhood.

October 13, 2007 10:26 AM PDT Permalink