alanc @ sun.com

3 years and still blogging...

Other Sun bloggers have been posting since Friday about the third anniversary of blogs.sun.com. Dilbert even had a very timely series of comics.

Today is actually the third anniversary of my first public blog post (though as you can see, I later migrated some earlier posts from my now abandoned internal blog to it), as I was traveling to the first X.Org Developer's Conference on the day of the initial launch, but signed up once I was there (back when signing up was simply e-mailing Will Snow to ask for an account), and started posting from there.

In my first post, I worried I wouldn't be able to find enough things to blog about - now I know I have too much to blog about, and time to write it all up is the limit - I was posting the changes in each Solaris Express release for a while, and more recently, the X ChangeLogs for each Solaris Nevada build, but both fell behind after a few months. I've got a list of links to other blogs and interesting sites that I want to post that keeps growing longer and longer as I fail to take enough time to post them here. I wasn't sure I would even get this post done during the b.s.c birthday celebration.

As some of the other bloggers mentioned, the effect has gone beyond just providing a way for any employee to post - the company's culture has changed. No longer do we complain about hearing about new announcements first in the press - blogs are now considered a crucial part of many announcement plans, especially around OpenSolaris, and bloggers are briefed in advance. I joked with Ben Rockwood at the SVOSUG last week about how much he's been yanking Sun's chain lately - how long ago would it be unimaginable that the CEO, VP's and Chief Architect get personally involved when a sysadmin at a startup complained about issues with Sun?

So much change in 3 short years - who knows where the next years will lead us?

Posted at 11:50PM Apr 29, 2007 by Alan Coopersmith in Sun  | 

Compiz for Solaris

Erwann has posted Compiz 0.5.0 packages for Solaris Nevada/Express on x86 today - this is the latest step of several months of work to make this happen.

We've been working on this for several reasons. Our accessibility architect became very enthused after seeing Beryl's screen magnification support and talking to the Beryl developers at last fall's Ubuntu Developer's Summit. Our (now-former) director of Solaris Open Source (including OpenSolaris and the Solaris Desktop & X teams) became a fan after seeing the demos at the X.Org Developer's Conference Sun hosted in February. Even the Solaris CTO has jumped on the bandwagon for making the Solaris Express Developer's Edition look more modern.

We were dreading the tough choice of having to pick Beryl or Compiz - at first glance, compiz looked more stable, but beryl had more plugins/effects and the accessibility support we were interested in. Fortunately, the compiz and beryl communities solved this problem by re-uniting their efforts.

There's still work to do before this is seamless though. Compiz requires newer versions of various X components than we've had in Solaris - even February's Solaris Express Developer Edition is too old for this. We already upgraded from the X11R6.9 Xorg server to Xorg server 1.2 (from X11R7.2) in Nevada build 58 (the February SXDE was based on Nevada build 55b). I posted last week to desktop-discuss a list of where we are on the X library updates and additions needed for compiz.

Will we integrate this directly into Solaris in the future? We don't know yet, but it's definitely an option being considered. Until then, if you have nvidia graphics on Solaris x86, try it out! (Intel graphics will be an option as well soon, once the Solaris DRI team brings the Intel DRI drivers up to the level required by the X11R7.2 Xorg. We may even be able to get it running on SPARC in the not-to-distant future, once the current project to port XVR-2500 support to Xorg gets to the OpenGL stage - right now, it's mainly got the 2D portions of the driver running.)

Posted at 10:55AM Apr 23, 2007 by Alan Coopersmith in Solaris  |  Comments[2]

X11 API's for querying multi-head screen layout

I should probably stick this in the X.Org wiki or OpenSolaris/GenUnix wiki, but I'm being lazy and just summarizing to here now from an e-mail thread last week on one of the Sun internal lists...

There are now 4 sets of API's to query the layout of display screens in a logical X screen when using a setup such as Xinerama, TwinView, or MergedFB:

1. the original X11R6.4 XPanoramiX* API
2. Sun's Xinerama API
3. XFree86's Xinerama API
4. Xrandr 1.2

The first is pretty much universally available, but also universally deprecated. The functions for it are defined in libXinerama on Linux, libXext on Solaris, but I don't think we've ever shipped the header for it on Solaris, since it was deprecated long ago.

The second Sun created and proposed to the old X.Org industry consortium to become the standard, but they did not adopt it, crafted a replacement in committee that was universally incompatible with everything and never adopted that either. It's what the <X11/extensions/xinerama.h> header in Solaris represents, and was never documented, but you can find a description of the API in PSARC 2000/036. The functions from it are found in Solaris libXext, but nowhere else in the world that I know of.

The third, aka libXinerama, is available on most XFree86 & Xorg based systems, and finally came to Solaris in nv_62 and soon in Solaris 10 patches & the next update release. It uses the <X11/extensions/Xinerama.h> (note the capitalization compared to the other) header and is documented in the man page we created for the Solaris integration and contributed back to X.Org.

The fourth is a very recent development, having been released after X11R7.2's release in February. X.Org is currently in the process of releasing version 1.3 of the Xorg server package (release candidate 5 is out now) - this will be the first Xorg server feature release not tied to one of the whole X Window System releases. (X11R7.2 had Xorg server 1.2, X11R7.3 is expected to have Xorg server 1.4.) The xf86-video-intel driver 2.0 release candidate 4 is also out, it is the first driver to support the new Xrandr 1.2 additions, though work is in progress on other drivers, including the Radeon and nvidia drivers. We don't have a definite roadmap for including this in Solaris yet - we'll probably do it once the X.Org releases are finished and we're passed the upcoming milestone of the second Solaris Express Developer Edition release in May.

Posted at 10:51PM Apr 16, 2007 by Alan Coopersmith in X11  |