alanc @ sun.com

Damn spammers

sigh Just had to waste ten minutes going through all the comments on here to delete about 20 from the $#^@*!ing blog spammers. The people who run blogs.sun.com have been looking into ways to stop it, unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a good solution that works for everyone - if you use a "captcha" (one of those images of text that's easy for people to read but hard for computers to recognize), then you block people with visual impairments - but just registration means they just program another step into their spambots. Unfortunately it's so cheap for them, even if they only get one sucker for millions of blog posts, they've made a profit.

Posted at 09:23AM Aug 20, 2004 by Alan Coopersmith in Solaris  |  Comments[1]

Toogle

This looks cool - enter a term into this search engine and not only does it find a picture, it converts on the fly to ascii art, such as these: [Accessibility warning - you don't want to follow these links in a screen reader unless you like hearing meaningless repetitive text for a long time.]

• Sun Microsystems
• X Window System (looks like a cover photo of one of the old O'Reilly X books)
• BSD daemon
• Tux
• Cal
• Golden Gate Bridge

[I had tried copying and pasting the html, but that seemed to be too much to handle for the Roller weblog server on blogs.sun.com]

It works better with images with lots of contrast and big details - for others sometimes you have to go to Google Image Search to figure out what the picture was before transformation (such as this picture found for "Darth Vader" - the text version is hard to figure out until you see the gorgeous original picture).

Posted at 12:08AM Aug 20, 2004 by Alan Coopersmith in General  |  Comments[1]

Solaris Express 8/04

Alan Hargreaves beat me to posting about this month's release of Solaris Express, but since he's Down Under, he's usually a day ahead of me anyway. While the high-level list is impressive, there's also a few hidden goodies and bug fixes people may appreciate - though to list them I'll have to reset my brain back to the build 63 used for SX 8/04 after spending the day working out the final kinks in build 65, hacking on code for build 67, and making plans for changes to go into build 68. Of course as an X developer, the changes in X and the desktop are the ones I know most about - no slight to the other parts of the system, I'm just sticking to what I know best. The following are in no particular order...

bugid 5045194: Xsun doesn't allow +xinerama to follow the -dev option

The -dev option parser in Xsun only recognized a word starting with - as the start of a new option, breaking on things such as -dev /dev/fb0 -dev /dev/fb1 +xinerama - this fixes it so that now works (or any other + option for that matter). The X server command line syntax is still a mess, even in Xorg, but that's where two decades of organic evolution has left us.

bugid 5031067: Xsun unsets interactive priority boost on itself

Xsun on Solaris uses the IA scheduling class to boost the priority of the process that currently has window focus - it also used to boost itself since the other processes can't get events or draw output without the Xserver getting CPU time. A while ago a bug was introduced that caused Xsun to give up it's boost - now that's fixed.

ATA driver improvements

Improvements for various ATA (aka IDE) controllers, including faster boot times on some, support for some SATA controllers and more

fbconfig -gui

A new gui mode for configuring various parameters on SPARC frame buffers.

idnconv

A new CLI utility for converting internationalized domain names between the local character set and the ASCII-compatible encoding used in DNS, so you can make your scripts IDN compatible or work with programs not yet updated to support IDN.

Perl updated to 5.8.4

See the release notes from the open source release for changes. Also perlgcc was added to the release to make it easier to compile perl modules with gcc instead of the Sun compilers.

bugid 5034873 usb mouse wheel scroll is not smooth

The USB mouse driver was not passing up scroll wheel events when the mouse wasn't moved much - you could scroll much faster by wiggling the mouse while rolling the wheel - this fixes that.

kdmconfig support for more resolutions

kdmconfig allows selecting 1400x1050 and other common laptop resolutions now without having to manually create a config file.

GNU tar (/usr/sfw/bin/gtar) updated to 1.14

Adds bzip compression support and other new features - see the changelog on the GNU tar site.

wget updated to 1.9.1

OpenGL 1.3 for Solaris SPARC moved to main OS CD

No longer do you need the Supplement CD to install OpenGL - it's on the main CD's and part of the normal install

Numerous fontconfig, STSF, and Xft fixes and improvements

Too many to list, but hard to see since nothing in Solaris Express uses these yet. To see this, you'ld need to be one of the lucky few early testers in the Java Desktop System for Solaris beta program or build open source programs using the libraries in Solaris.

dtlogin starts Xsun with -defdepth 24 by default

I know this will make some users very happy, while others will laugh at us and say "welcome to the 21st century", but this has been a long fight thanks to legacy software that only works in 8-bit PseudoColor mode. If you've still got some of this, you can easily disable this in the dtlogin Xservers configuration file, but for most people, this will bring a welcome improvement in the graphics quality of modern applications (though at a small performance penalty on some cards, since it does mean transferring 4 times as much data across the system bus for images).

O_NOFOLLOW & O_NOLINKS options to open(2)

Makes it easier to write secure code

There's a lot more, especially in the kernel and drivers, but I can't do justice to all of them...

Posted at 09:45PM Aug 17, 2004 by Alan Coopersmith in Solaris  |  Comments[9]

If it's Wednesday, it must be JDS ConCall day...

As noted last week, I've not been posting much as I've been very busy on various projects reaching critical stages, including helping with the X.Org Foundation X11R6.8 release and X window system work for Solaris 10 and the upcoming Java Desktop System releases for Solaris. The days blur together a bit, with the various weekly conference calls serving to tell them apart (hence the title). Therefore, I'm going to cheat, and repost some things I've written elsewhere today...

I haven't seen anyone from the audience report on their impressions of our X.Org forum at LinuxWorld Expo SF (see last week's post), though I would be interested to see what people thought. From the front platform the session seemed to go well, with about 30-40 people attended and we showed some demos of the new extensions in X11R6.8 (some of which will also be in S10) and talked both about how the new X.Org Foundation is working and where we see X going in the future. We talked about trying to balance new development and stability, and I even plugged our favorite projects, which drive Sun's interest in the new extensions - Project Looking Glass and the GNOME Accessibility Project.

BTW, for those who don't know, X11R6.8 is in beta testing now. We're working on it at Sun to make sure it works as well as we can make it on Solaris x86 (unfortunately, there are no working Xorg drivers for modern hardware on the SPARC side of Solaris right now), but anyone with interest and spare cycles who wants to build & test is invited to do so. For more info on the release plans, new features, and how to help, see the Release Plan & Status web pages and the xorg and release-wranglers mailing lists.

Elsewhere I noted that the movement towards greater transparency and customer communications via efforts like blogs.sun.com are a bit strange at the moment since they are both pushing up from the bottom of the org chart, with many engineers and other "individual contributors" participating, and pushing down from the top, with people like Jonathan Schwartz and John Fowler participating, but hasn't met in the middle yet, with the layers of middle management still out of the picture - where many of the decisions people want to know about are made and best explained. (For instance, you can find my blog here, and that of the VP I work for, Glenn Weinberg, but you won't find the manager I report to, the senior manager he reports to, or the director he reports to (who in turn reports to Glenn).) Perhaps it will just take time and growing numbers above and below to squeeze them out of the conference rooms and out here with the rest of us...

Posted at 12:29AM Aug 11, 2004 by Alan Coopersmith in General  |  Comments[3]

X.Org updates & LinuxWorld Forum

I haven't written lately (which is probably why I've fallen off the top 50 most popular blogs on the blogs.sun.com front page) since I've been very busy finishing up work for the upcoming Java Desktop System release for the new Sun Opteron workstations and for Solaris 10, but the quickly-growing group of people working on the X.Org releases have been busy too. A flurry of checkins led up to the feature freeze over the weekend for the X11R6.8.0 release, including all of the features I mentioned in my blog entry in June. Now testing and bug fixing is underway to meet the planned release date of August 25. The release status and progress is being tracked in this wiki page and on the X.Org Release Wranglers mailing list.

Also this week, several people from X.Org (including yours truly for some strange reason) will be at LinuxWorld Expo San Francisco for a panel discussion on The X Window System and Related Critical Foundational Technologies on Thursday at 1pm. There will also be people manning the X.Org booth on the show floor if you want to stop by and visit.

Posted at 11:12AM Aug 02, 2004 by Alan Coopersmith in X11  |