alanc @ sun.com

Alan Coopersmith’s blog

Random thoughts of a disorganized mind...
(and though it should be obvious, while Sun pays me to think about things, they disclaim any responsibility for these thoughts, nor do I claim what I say matches in any way what Sun thinks)

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http://blogs.sun.com/alanc/date/20050125 Tuesday January 25, 2005

Xorg 6.8.2 release candidate 3

The third (and probably final) release candidate of Xorg 6.8.2 is now out at http://xorg.freedesktop.org/X11R6.8.2/ (look for the 6.8.1.903 tarballs - see the announcement for MD5 sums).

Bug fixes since the last release include:

  • Bugzilla #1424: Fix problems with RENDER extension acceleration on R100 cards (via pre-rendering small texture). [Matthias Hopf - SuSE]
  • Bugzilla #2322: Fix corruption of PCI config BAR1 of native PCI-Express boards on 64-bit platforms. [Michael Yaroslavtsev]
  • Bugzilla #1896: Add support for pt_BR.UTF-8 locale. [Gustavo Noronha Silva, Branden Robinson, Julien Lafon - Debian Project]
  • Bugzilla #1804: missing TwoByteSwap if compiling with internal FreeType [Roland Mainz]
  • Bugzilla #2361: radeon m7 driver locks up on glxgears [Dave Airlie]
  • Bugzilla #2329: i815 Xserver crashes on console switch w/ DRI enabled [Matthias Hopf - SuSE]
  • Bugzilla #1372: XRX (Broadway) support omitted from X11R6.8 [Roland Mainz]
  • Bugzilla #2167: Fix broken Solaris print queue enumeration. [Roland Mainz]
  • Bugzilla #2254: Fix for gcc4.0 build failure [Egbert Eich - SuSE and Roland Mainz]
  • Bugzilla #2240: /etc/init.d/xprint uses /usr/bin/tr the wrong way [Drew Parsons - Debian Project]
  • Bugzilla #2264: Don't build Tdfx DRM for platforms where the glide lib doesn't exist. [Egbert Eich - SuSE]
  • Bugzilla #2215: Add i810 driver for AMD64. [Kristian Høgsberg]
  • Bugzilla #2215: Cleanup and enhancements in xc/config/cf/xorg.cf [Egbert Eich - SuSE]
  • Bugzilla #2261: Update C&T manual page to explain the FpMode option. [Egbert Eich - SuSE]

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Posted at 10:04PM Jan 25, 2005 by Alan Coopersmith in X11  | 

OpenSolaris gives cuddletech name a whole new meaning...

“Sun offers open source Solaris snack pack” is The Register's contribution to the many stories about the OpenSolaris site launch today. In it, they note that people have taken to pronouncing the license's acronym CDDL as “cuddle.”

Curiously, one of the participants in the OpenSolaris pilot program runs a site named cuddletech - which seems like a perfect name for discussing technology released under the “cuddle” license. Of course, the domainname was registered in 1999, so there's no way Ben could have known the additional future signifance his domainname would acquire . . . or did he? We may never know . . .

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Posted at 01:02PM Jan 25, 2005 by Alan Coopersmith in Solaris  |  Comments[1]

http://blogs.sun.com/alanc/date/20050124 Monday January 24, 2005

Yet another cool new Google search engine

Google now offers video search, including searching for what was said on recent TV shows. Now if I could just search it from my TiVo and download the video on demand it would be incredibly cool. Okay, maybe not useful (at least I can't think of a good use off hand), but really cool...

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Posted at 10:46PM Jan 24, 2005 by Alan Coopersmith in General  | 

http://blogs.sun.com/alanc/date/20050121 Friday January 21, 2005

Gathering of the comp.unix.solaris mavens

Everyone's favorite Solaris programming book author, Rich Teer was visiting the Sun Menlo Park campus this week, and I got to serve as host for an impromptu meet-and-greet tour of the building where much of the Solaris core engineering teams work. At one point, we ran into Casper Dik, Solaris FAQ maintainer and designer of Solaris 10's new privilege model, who was also here on a visit. Of course, I couldn't help thinking that were an asteroid to hit the building right then, the volume of traffic on the comp.unix.solaris Usenet newsgroup would plummet. (If their names aren't both well known to you, you probably don't read the Solaris newsgroups much, as they are two of the most active posters, having both answered thousands of questions from Solaris users and even getting in the occasional argument when some troll looking for fun crossposts inflammatory materials to both the Solaris and the Linux advocacy newsgroups.)

Unfortunately, I didn't think to take a picture of us all together...

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Posted at 06:01PM Jan 21, 2005 by Alan Coopersmith in Solaris  | 

http://blogs.sun.com/alanc/date/20050116 Sunday January 16, 2005

Xorg 6.8.2 release candidate 2

Xorg 6.8.2 Release Manager Roland Mainz has tagged and bagged Release Candidate 2 and put it out for testing. See his announcement to the Xorg mailing list for details. There's a much smaller number of fixes in this release than RC1, but there's still plenty to test.

Like RC1, we've pulled it into the Xorg packages for the next release of Solaris (too late for Solaris 10) - you should see them in Solaris Express around the 2/05 or 3/05 releases.

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Posted at 09:29PM Jan 16, 2005 by Alan Coopersmith in X11  | 

http://blogs.sun.com/alanc/date/20050114 Friday January 14, 2005

The "Desktop Configuration" rights profile in Solaris 10

Solaris ships with several X configuration utilities which require additional privileges to run. To allow selected users to run these without having to have the root password, an RBAC (Role Based Access Control) rights profile has been created with the name "Desktop Configuration".

Users with the rights granted by this profile can do these things normally requiring root privileges, starting in Solaris 10 (build s10_73 and later):

  • Change the SMF configuration for the X11 & font services (I'll talk more about these in a future blog entry)
  • Have xorgconfig save the configuration output to /etc/X11/xorg.conf
  • Run scanpci to see the PCI devices available on the system.

Additional configuration tools will likely be added to this profile in the future, including possibly those for CDE & JDS desktops like dtlogin & gdm configuration.

For example, if I wanted to allow the user alanc to change the X server configuration without having to have the root password, I would just add this line to /etc/user_attr: 

alanc::::profiles=Desktop Configuration

I can then login as alanc and run svccfg to change the X server options or run pfexec /usr/X11/bin/scanpci to see the list of PCI devices in the system. If correctly configured, when the user runs the auths command, they should see the solaris.smf.manage.x11 and solaris.smf.manage.font authorizations listed.

For more information on using RBAC and rights profiles, see the manual Solaris 10 System Administrator Collection > System Administration Guide: Security Services.

[See more blogs and links on Solaris at ]

Posted at 05:55PM Jan 14, 2005 by Alan Coopersmith in Solaris  | 

http://blogs.sun.com/alanc/date/20050107 Friday January 07, 2005

Changing the greeting in the new dtlogin screen

I mentioned a while ago about the new look of the Solaris 10 login screen (which was updated again after that original post to match the new Solaris logo and branding themes). A question that I've been asked a couple of times since then is how the new look, with the greeting in a smaller text box centered on the right side, affects people who replace the "Welcome to hostname" with another message, like the "Anyone who uses this computer without permission will suffer unspeakably horrible consequences" messages that some places like to have. (See the section Changing the Login Screen Appearance in the CDE Advanced User's guide on docs.sun.com to learn how to do this.) So I figured I'd share the answer here to save having to have more people ask about it. Note that parts of this are not strictly fully supported - since Sun reserves the right to change the look-and-feel of the login screen again in the future, and that's implemented in the styleModern file mentioned here, customizing it may leave you with a very strange looking screen when you upgrade to a release with a different screen layout.

The size of the welcome banner is configured in the X resources file, so it can be changed if necessary - or as noted before, the old look and feel can be easily restored for those sites who have customized it for whatever reason. In fact, if you've already customized it by creating /etc/dt/config/C/Xresources, it should simply preserve the old look and feel and your customizations. (The new look and feel is activated by the "#include <styleModern>" line added to the /usr/dt/config/Xresources file.)

To restore the old look and feel: 

     mkdir -p /etc/dt/config/C
     touch /etc/dt/config/C/styleModern
or 
     mkdir -p /etc/dt/config/C
     cp /usr/dt/config/C/Xresources /etc/dt/config/C/Xresources
     vi /etc/dt/config/C/Xresources
     [ remove the #include <styleModern>line ]

To make the welcome banner the full screen width: 

     mkdir -p /etc/dt/config/C
     cp /usr/dt/config/C/styleModern /etc/dt/config/C/styleModern
     vi /etc/dt/config/C/styleModern
Change the Dtlogin*greeting.leftOffset value for your screen size to a small number - for instance, for 1280x1024 or larger screens, change the 726 to 98 and it should be centered and covering most of the width of the backdrop.

[See more blogs and links on Solaris at ]

Posted at 11:30AM Jan 07, 2005 by Alan Coopersmith in Solaris  |  Comments[2]

http://blogs.sun.com/alanc/date/20050104 Tuesday January 04, 2005

Catching up

After being gone for a week and a half, I've been digging out from under a deep pile of e-mail and RSS feeds...there's a bunch of good stuff in there though. Highlights:

Posted at 10:32AM Jan 04, 2005 by Alan Coopersmith in General  |