Squandering solstice daylight
Light pollution is one of my pet peeves. For example, excessively bright and misdirected "security lights" illuminate some barns and gas stations to a level where dentistry and brain surgery could be performed. There seems to be an assumption that doubling the illuminated wattage per square meter halves the crime rate. I find that nighttime light pollution continues to grow worse in the U.S. Many children born east of the Mississippi have never seen more than a couple hundred stars. When an earthquake knocked out the lights in Los Angeles, 911 operators were flooded with calls wondering what that glow in the sky was... it was the Milky way. People had ever seen it before!
But night time light pollution is only half of the problem. I intended to post a photograph of an Racine gas station which makes use of RUUD lighting's innovative new efficient LED canopy lights but the lights were burning in broad daylight which makes no sense at all! Even if LEDs use 1/10th the energy of metal halide or mercury vapor bulbs, why use them on a bright sunny day?
I find that this daytime "light pollution" is far more common in Dublin Ireland than any place I've lived in the U.S. Even today, summer solstice when Dublin enjoyed almost 20 hours of bright natural daylight, you'll find hundreds of outdoor lights burning all day long. Many of the "dawn to dusk" lights here seem to use timers instead of photoelectric daylight sensors, so they're also burning in broad daylight along with the 24hour lights. Sun is doing our part to save electricity with thin clients and efficient servers. I do my part by turning off appliances, hanging out laundry and using CF and LED lights in my home where I can. I only wish that the electric rate were scaled up with the wastefulness of the usage patterns. Maybe more people would do the right thing. I've heard that gas stations in the U.S. aren't profiting from drastic (400%) increases in the cost of gasoline in the past 10 years. But as long as these companies insist on using excessive wattage and glare to attract customers, I'm going to assume they have some room left in their profit margin.
Posted at 02:07AM Jun 21, 2008 by bnitz in Environment | Comments[0]
My OpenSolaris for Developers talk at the Irish Opensource Technology Conference
I should thank the sponsors and organizers of the Irish OpenSource Technology Conference (IOTC) for giving me the opportunity to present OpenSolaris as an Open Source Developer Tool to some of Ireland's brightest and most energetic open source developers. There were quire a few university attendees and Barry was able to bring in people from small and midsized Irish companies such as openApp and hosting365 as well as multinationals such as Microsoft, IBM, RedHat, Sun and AIB (more about this later!)
My talk seemed to be well understood by the audience and I managed to empty out a heavy backpack full of ¨Free as in Free" OpenSolaris 2008.05 CDs afterwards. I didn't have enough time to talk about SMF or PKG(5) in detail, but I did spend some time on ZFS and Dtrace; both of which I'm certain would be useful to any Open Source developer. Even if your pointy-haired boss demands that you must code your application in VisualBasic and deploy on Redhat 3.5 via Wine, you can sneak OpenSolaris onto one of your QA department's test boxes and run your software in a zone where you can dtrace it. Or you could set up an OpenSolaris file server with ZFS snapshots as frequently as necessary (perhaps every keystroke for some UIDs?) I won't tell anyone... honest ;-)
One gentleman grabbed a CD and asked me if OpenSolaris 2008.05 was available on Sparc. Another asked whether zones could be Opensolaris as well as linux and whether you could have hundreds of copies of apache running independently in hundreds of zones each with its own isolated ports. One of the attendees had used dtrace before log ago, but he didn't know it could do so much. (Remind me to blog about my "anti-destruction, destructive dtrace script later!) A couple of university students spoke of Sun's mistakes in the past, were surprised that Sun was so involved with FOSS software. They said they didn't see much Solaris or OpenSolaris for years, but they're starting to see it more often again. Fantastic, the spark (if not Sparc) is back!
I caught the tail end of a RedHat talk on LVM2 later. I admire anyone with the Red Hat certified expertise required to do old-style volume management, but to see the amount of effort that goes into what anyone (including me) can do with a couple of ZFS commands makes me want to burn a stack of punched cards!
Posted at 12:19AM Jun 21, 2008 by bnitz in OpenSolaris | Comments[0]
How to keep gam_server from doing too much
The Gamin file monitoring subsystem was introduced to OpenSolaris a few months ago. Since it monitors file changes, there are cases where it can become very busy and consume significant system resources. Most of the resource consumption issues will probably be fixed by build 92, but for those of us running OpenSolaris 2008.05 or Nevada builds before build 92, or those of us with special requirements such as remote NFS mounted home directories, AlekZ's Scratchpad has a very nice workaround to put gam_server back in its place. I'd recommend the following slightly modified workaround:
1. Create /etc/gamin directory:
# mkdir /etc/gamin
2. Create file /etc/gamin/gaminrc. It may contain the following lines (this is just an example, you can set your own polling intervals):
fsset nfs poll 15
fsset ufs poll 15
fsset lofs poll 15
fsset zfs poll 15
3. Restart gam_server (let me know if there is a better way):
# pkill gam_server ; rm -rf /tmp/gam_*
Posted at 11:01PM Jun 14, 2008 by bnitz in OpenSolaris | Comments[1]
HDR Images with Qtpfsgui
I've been experimenting with tone mapping RAW images with the Qtpfsgui OpenSource tool. It's always difficult to get the sky and foreground things (like spring tree leaves or cherry blossoms) to be simultaneously exposed properly. In the chemical photography days, you'd have to dodge and burn in tiny areas of the photo to properly compress reality's tonal range onto the limited dynamic range of paper prints. I'd like to build Qtpfsgui for OpenSolaris, but it looked like the GNU/Linux versions depended on a particular development environment. Now I see that some versions seem to have been built with cmake which is portable to OpenSolaris. I'll let you know if I figure out how to build it.
Posted at 12:03AM May 24, 2008 by bnitz in Open-Source | Comments[6]
Google streetview goes to Wisconsin
Google's GPS equipped cars visited Southeastern Wisconsin last summer, during some of the best weather Wisconsin has to offer. They visited my home town during one of the brightest days. It's amazing how thoroughly they've covered southeastern Wisconsin, practically every road and even the blue sky above in photos that are much sharper than those I've seen taken nearer to Google's California headquarters.
It's strange to be sitting over 3000 miles away and see neighborhoods I never visited while growing up there. I understand the privacy concerns. When virtually touring narrow streets in Racine such as Gideon Ct., you almost expect people to come out and yell at you for stepping on their flowerbeds. It is useful to see a destination before driving there for the first time and it's nice to be able to show friends the house I grew up in and also the brick houses overlooking Lake Michigan that my Pomeranian ancestors built when they emigrated to the U.S. in the mid 19th century.
I wonder if the fact that thousands of sub $200k houses are unsold in decent neighborhoods throughout the midwest might bring back a sense of reality to real-estate markets which seem to have lost the plot for a while. Compare the zillow.com price estimates for victorian houses on College Avenue, or anything near Racine's zoo or Wind point... to almost anything in Las Vegas or California and you'll wonder whether someone has their decimal point in the wrong place. But then Google might contribute to the problem of wealthy remote holiday homeowners driving local prices beyond the reach of police, firemen, teachers...
Taxes, lack of good jobs and weather are the three biggest problems with living in the "rust belt." Those of us from the upper midwest should thank Google for showing our part of the world in a good light.
Posted at 10:57PM May 23, 2008 by bnitz in World | Comments[0]
Spring in Wisconsin
I recently returned to a visit with the family in Wisconsin. After more than 100 inches of snow in what was one of the snowiest winters since 1979, very few people were happy to see April snow showers. But we were. After a few grey wet Dublin winters, we enjoyed the April snowfall. The snow only lasted a few hours and spring came back in full force a few days later with temperatures in the 70s.
[Read More]Posted at 02:27PM May 14, 2008 by bnitz in Environment |
Linux crash at 35000 feet (what happened to QA?)
The Aer Lingus Airbus 330-300 that my family took to the U.S. a few weeks ago was equipped with video screens on every seat. Each passenger had the choice of several video games, songs, TV shows and movies. My wife watched Cecelia Ahern's tearjerker "P.S. I love you", and after checking the options, I started the same movie about 30 minutes later on my screen and started a Snoopy/Charlie brown cartoon on my daughter's screen. It's pretty impressive when you think about it. The Airbus 330-300 can hold over 200 passengers and I'd expect that decent quality small-screen video requires about 1MB/sec. Hmm, come to think of it, 200MB/sec isn't that impressive, I think my old G3 powerbook usually managed to keep up with that speed of video data on its firewire port, but somewhere, one or more CPUs is very busy uncompressing up to 200 streams of video data.
The most interesting part of our experience came when my daughter decided that the sardonic "Peanuts" cartoon wasn't what she wanted so I hit the home menu button about 3/4ths of the way through her movie. The very instant I hit the home menu button, her screen went black and began booting a version of Red Hat Linux. Then I noticed that my screen and my wife's screen were also booting Linux. I looked around me, everyone's screen was scrolling the ugly text of the Linux kernel boot sequence, a tiny penguin peered from the upper left corner of each screen. "Did I do that?", I wondered. A few minutes later everyone was back to their movie as though nothing had happened. My wife commented that people have become so accustomed to computers crashing that this didn't surprise anyone. It looks like I'm not the first to have seen Linux crash onboard a flight. Another friend told us of a similar failure which wasn't resolved even after someone came from the cockpit on their flight in a failed attempt to repair and reboot the same entertainment system.
Even with the occasional crash, X86 hardware running Red Hat Linux with MythTV or some other PVR software may be adequate for an in-flight entertainment system. Let's just hope the software used for fly-by-wire and air traffic control is more robust and more well-tested.
Posted at 10:07AM May 02, 2008 by bnitz in Open-Source | Comments[1]
All time environmental boondoggle awards
It isn't always obvious to people outside of the U.S. why Joe-sixpack seems to have such a powerful allergy to conservation, efficiency and sensible environmentalism. The reason is that pseudoenvironmentalists have tried to pull the wool over his eyes many times in the decades since the first earth day, and because of the abysmal level of Joe-sixpack science literacy, they've usually succeeded. Wisconsin's Bill Proxmire was known as the founder of Earth Day and for his "golden fleece" awards for wasteful Congressional spending. In his honor, here are my nominations for the all time greatest environmental boondoggles:
- Magnetic gasoline mpg enhancers. (Add to this the German device which detects the "tachyon signature" of nuclear generated power and stops such energy at your outlet.)
- 1970s rooftop solar heating. Perhaps I'm being a bit unfair here. Some of these actually did produce heat, some even produced enough to pay for themselves over a decade or two. But because the qualification standards for President Carter's eco-subsidies weren't well enforced, many hideously inefficient devices were constructed. Sometimes the cost of the electricity to run the water pumps, the leakage of home heat on winter nights and other issues caused these devices to waste more energy than they saved and gave solar a bad name which hasn't yet been overcome in many parts of the U.S.
- "Clean" coal. Clean coal as currently defined releases exactly the same tonnage of CO2 per ton of coal burned as dirty coal did 100 years ago. Call me a skeptic but to date "carbon sequestering" may eventually also fall into the boondoggle category. Almost 1000 train cars full of coal enter a typical 1000 Megawatt coal power plant every day. Whether the CO2 created is compressed or converted into a carbonate, it would have more mass than the coal it came from. If you think looking for burial sites for nuclear waste is an unsurmountable problem, try to figure out where to hide 1000 train cars full of carbonate rock every day for each of the thousands of coal power plants all over the world.
- 21st century CF light laws. Like ethanol fuel, this can be a useful energy efficiency technology when used properly. I've used compact florescent lights since the early 90s when they were relatively reliable. But incandescent light bans and other misguided "environmental" laws have forced these to be used where they don't belong and seem to have created incentives for cheap junk bulbs to be shipped across the ocean only to end up in landfills. In my experience, 1 out of 5 brand name CF lights made in the 21st century are defective (i.e. last no longer then 6 weeks) and in many locales there is not yet a safe way of disposing of the dead bulbs.
- California's "Zero(sic) emission" vehicle laws which effectively gave coal powered cars an advantage over those fueled by gasoline.
- MTBE. This gasoline additive was designed to help gasoline burn cleaner but it proved to be very efficient at polluting waterways.
- Corn ethanol. Even farmers here in Wisconsin's corn belt are beginning to understand this as the biggest eco-boondoggle in our generation. Massive government subsidies are rewarding a handful of corporations in an industry which burns as much oil to produce as it replaces. It effectively burns food in U.S. automobile gasoline tanks and has already caused food price inflation and job losses.
This is just my first draft list but I'm open to suggestions. I could be convinced that any of these technologies isn't a boondoggle if someone shows me the science. Unfortunately the level of science literacy amongst citizens and politicians is very low. The level of government investment in ecology and energy efficiency scientific research is also relatively low. So we are left with the questionable science funded by vested interests and the political might of a handful of powerful lobbiests running the show. As P.T. Barnum put it, "There's a sucker born every minute."
Posted at 06:16PM Apr 22, 2008 by bnitz in Environment | Comments[2]
Serving Sun Rays from inside a VirtualBox
Imagine you have some Sun Ray[tm] clients and you'd like to use them with some hardware which doesn't support Solaris. Or maybe you're running OSX, Windows or Ubuntu on some hardware which has some spare cycles but isn't running an OS which is supported by SRSS.
- Download a copy of VirtualBox for your operating system.
- Download a copy of Solaris 10 which is supported by SRSS3 and SRSS4.
- Download a copy of Sun Ray Server Software. I used SRSS 4.0 09/07. Note:Some GNU/Linux distributions are also supported, and SRSS can be forced to work with some unsupported Linux distributions and versions of OpenSolaris. But I'll stick with Solaris 10u5, it's reasonably lightweight and solid.
- For Solaris Nevada build 85 I ran
/usr/sbin/ifconfig -a
to get the name of the network interface and make sure networking is working. - Launch VirtualBox.
- Use New to Create a virtual machine.
- Go to settings and network for this virtual machine and set the networking Attached to: Host Interface and type the interface name from the ifconfig -a you just ran. Note:I found that using this "Host Interface" setting requires that you launch VirtualBox as root, though I'm sure there is a better way using RDAP profiles or something.
- Boot your VirtualBox and navigate to your Solaris 10 media. Install Solaris 10 (arguably the most challenging step, S10 installs are ugly and slow compared to any of the more recent OpenSolaris distributions.
- Login to your new Solaris 10 virtual machine.
- Make sure networking is working and that the virtual machine knows its own hostname.
- Get or set the virtual host's IP address {it will be used later}
- Copy the Sun Ray software into the virtual host environment. You may find that the virtual host can't ping its "Dom 0" parent, so copy to another machine or download SRSS from within the virtual host.
- Unpack the Sun Ray software and run
utinstall
. I usually go with all defaults but I leave the DHCP server turned off since there is usually a DHCP server on my network. - Configure the Sun Ray server:
/opt/SUNWut/sbin/utadm -c /opt/SUNWut/sbin/utadm -A 192.168.1.0 # {allows you to server Sun Ray over this network } /opt/SUNWut/sbin/utadm -L on # {enable LAN connection from Sun Ray} /opt/SUNWut/sbin/utadm -n # {bring server online} /opt/SUNWut/sbin/utrestart - Now connect your Sun Ray client to the network or if you're already connected to another Sun Ray server, do this:
/opt/SUNWut/sbin/utswitch -h {your VirtualHost's IP address"
VBoxHeadless -startvm {your vmname}
You can also access this headless virtualbox by using rdesktop:
rdesktop {parent host's IP}
It seemed to me that the responsiveness of the JDS desktop environment on the remote Sun Ray client was at least as good as the performance of the VirtualBox display on the local laptop.
Limitations: This does not allow you to display the MS Windows or Ubuntu environment on the Sun Ray client. For that you're better off running rdesktop on a real (not virtualized) Sun Ray server and running Windows in headless mode inside the VirtualBox.
Posted at 04:31PM Apr 03, 2008 by bnitz in opensolaris-howto | Comments[3]
Published OpenSolaris desktop FAQ
I gathered questions and answers from the OpenSolaris desktop mailing list, other forums
and other places and people and published the first version of an OpenSolaris Nevada Desktop FAQ here:
http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Desktop_FAQ_for_Solaris_Nevada_(JDS)
This FAQ is focused on the GNOME and other desktop components which are available in recent Solaris Nevada distributions. Though it should be noted that "Indiana" shares most of these components. I would appreciate any help in keeping the document accurate, up to date and complete. Once the default desktops on other distributions become as well defined and well used, I plan to publish additional FAQs. I also hope to move the document onto an opensolaris hosted twiki once such a twiki goes online. Thanks to everyone who contributed questions and answers!
Posted at 03:24PM Apr 03, 2008 by bnitz in opensolaris-howto |
lights out for earth hour
World Wildlife Federation (WWF) is sponsoring the first earth hour. If you'd like to participate, just turn of your lights (and other excess energy consuming devices)...
Posted at 06:35PM Mar 28, 2008 by bnitz in Environment |
7 years in Ireland, 7 years at Sun.
Today marks my 7 year anniversary of arriving in Ireland and working for Sun. I should thank my wife for talking me into it, my kids for making it a fun, wonderful adventure. I should thank my Sun friends for helping make it work. And finally I should thank the Irish immigration department and my other Irish friends for tolerating my reverse emigration even thought they may think it's a totally daft idea altogether.
Posted at 10:32PM Mar 20, 2008 by bnitz in Living Abroad | Comments[1]
dtrace getenv and GNOME
While tracking down the root cause of intermittent hangs (often > 1 second) when traversing the panel menus on GNOME 2.20.1, I found some interesting things about how GNOME works. On one of my installs, the gtk-update-icon-cache hadn't been created correctly and doing anything which read an icon crashed the application (e.g. clicking on a panel menu.) This led to me to searching for the cause of this failure. I wanted to make sure gtk-update-icon-cache wasn't unnecessarily failing on assert The code looked O.K. but I thought I'd look at the system with dtrace. This led me to a nice putenv.d dtrace script. gtk-update-icon-cache doesn't seem to set G_DEBUG so that question is answered. But I decided to make a small change to script to look at getenv during a simple launch of eog. This gave me some interesting results:
bash-3.2$ dtrace -s ./getenv.d -c "eog" CPU ID FUNCTION:NAME 0 66661 getenv:entry env[LANGUAGE]= LANGUAGE 0 66661 getenv:entry env[NLSPATH]= NLSPATH 0 66661 getenv:entry env[LANGUAGE]= LANGUAGE 0 66661 getenv:entry env[NLSPATH]= NLSPATH 0 66661 getenv:entry env[G_MESSAGES_PREFIXED]= G_MESSAGES _PREFIXED 0 66661 getenv:entry env[G_DEBUG]= G_DEBUG 0 66661 getenv:entry env[CHARSET]= CHARSET 0 66661 getenv:entry env[LIBCHARSET_ALIAS_DIR]= LIBCHARSE T_ALIAS_DIR 0 66661 getenv:entry env[G_RANDOM_VERSION]= G_RANDOM_VERS ION 0 66661 getenv:entry env[LANGUAGE]= LANGUAGE ...Then lots of redundant getenvs.
getenv LANGUAGE 1832 times getenv NLSPATH 1679 times getenv TZ 432 timesaggregating on ustack shows that a good share of these come from these backtraces:
getenv
libc.so.1`getenv
libc.so.1`getsystemTZ+0x1c
libc.so.1`mktime+0x24
libc.so.1`__strftime_std+0x3c
libglib-2.0.so.0.1400.4`g_time_val_to_iso8601+0x60
libglib-2.0.so.0.1400.4`timestamp_to_iso8601+0x24
libglib-2.0.so.0.1400.4`bookmark_item_dump+0x68
libglib-2.0.so.0.1400.4`g_bookmark_file_dump+0x16c
libglib-2.0.so.0.1400.4`g_bookmark_file_to_data+0x70
libglib-2.0.so.0.1400.4`g_bookmark_file_to_file+0xbc
144
getenv
libc.so.1`getenv
libglib-2.0.so.0.1400.4`guess_category_value+0x24
libglib-2.0.so.0.1400.4`g_get_language_names+0x68
libglib-2.0.so.0.1400.4`g_key_file_locale_is_interesting+0x1c
libglib-2.0.so.0.1400.4`g_key_file_parse_key_value_pair+0x2b8
libglib-2.0.so.0.1400.4`g_key_file_parse_line+0x178
libglib-2.0.so.0.1400.4`g_key_file_flush_parse_buffer+0x80
libglib-2.0.so.0.1400.4`g_key_file_parse_data+0x104
libglib-2.0.so.0.1400.4`g_key_file_load_from_fd+0x1fc
Now, here is the weird part. The application seems to continue polling getenv when you're on an active menu. I tried this with gnome-panel. The good news is that when I'm not touching panel, it doesn't seem to be polling environment variable. But when I hold the mouse over or traversed the launch menu, it continually tried to grab ESPEAKER and DISPLAY environment variables.
These were all coming from this section of code:
libc.so.1`getenv
libesd.so.0.2.38`esd_open_sound+0x44
libgnome-2.so.0.1999.2`use_sound+0x48
libgnome-2.so.0.1999.2`gnome_sound_connection_get+0x18
libgnomeui-2.so.0.2000.1`relay_gnome_signal+0x1cc
libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.4`signal_emit_unlocked_R+0x69c
libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.4`g_signal_emit_valist+0x784
libgobject-2.0.so.0.1400.4`g_signal_emit+0x1c
libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.1200.3`gtk_widget_show+0xb8
gnome-panel`panel_util_query_tooltip_cb+0x20
libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.1200.3`_gtk_marshal_BOOLEAN__INT_INT_BOOLE
Whoah, I had system sounds enabled for tooltips? I checked the preferences and sure enough system sounds were enabled. I never heard any so my audio hardware must not be supported. I still don't know for certain if this was the cause of the hang, since the hang was intermittent. But if you haven't tried it already, install GNOME on a machine with dtrace capability and look around a bit. If nothing else, you may learn something new.
Posted at 05:33PM Mar 20, 2008 by bnitz in OpenSolaris |
Gobi Sun Ray client laptop and kids
At the moment, my daughter is quietly playing a playhouse Disney game on a (quiet, diskless and cool!) Accutech Gobi laptop.
Under Construction
This Gobi 7 is an early evaluation model and is not without its kinks. I've been trying to configure as an alternate Sun Ray client for work. After reading Dan Lacher's blog some documents and a few helpful emails, I still didn't have any luck getting the Gobi go connect via VPN through my router to Sun's servers. So I thought I'd try connecting to a Sun Ray server on a local network. As this is a holiday weekend and I didn't plan to go into work, I needed to configure a Sun Ray server at home.
Don't try this at home
O.K. do try this at home, but try to find a better computer. Alternative hobbies, the cost of everything in Ireland, kids and other priorities turned me into a late adopter of home technology. Our best home computer is still an 8-year old Apple G3 Powerbook which was a hand-me-down from my brother who is a video and 3D animation artist. Our only desktop PC is an EOL'd Dell GX110 with 512Mb of RAM. I had previously installed Solaris Nevada Build 50 on this in order to play with ZFS and provide temporary storage for some iMovies and photos. Also if anyone breaks into the house, the last thing they'll want to haul out is this heavy piece of scrap. I hadn't upgraded because the installer for S10U4 and many of the newer Nevada builds gave up at the pitiful amount of memory. Fortunately, SXDE 09/07 was slightly more compassionate, and I was able to run a text install. After the fresh install (being careful to preserve my video and photo slices), it was simply a matter of:
zpool import bigdrive zpool import exporthomeThis imported and created permanent mounts for my iMovies and photos on /export/home and /bigdrive. Cool!
O.K. SXDE 09/07 installed, but can I put SRSS on this? I won't know if I don't try. I downloaded SRSS 4.0 for Solaris and ran
utinstall. I had chosen the end user install cluster so it turned out I had to manually install some dhcp packages. Then:
/opt/SUNWut/sbin/utconfig {answer a bunch of questions} I defaulted everything except enabling a dhcp server and web admin.
/opt/SUNWut/sbin/utadm -c
/opt/SUNWut/sbin/utadm -A 192.168.1.0 (My LAN network address)
/opt/SUNWut/sbin/utadm -L on
/opt/SUNWut/sbin/utadm -n
/opt/SUNWut/sbin/utrestart
Next I enter my wifi parameters into the Gobi laptop, tell it to use DHCP and for some reason I don't understand, don't tell it the IP address of the Sun Ray server (it figures it out). There it is, the dtlogin prompt! I login, browse to Playhouse Disney to test the ability to run flash games. Hmm, it looks a bit jumpy as I would expect. A 600Mhz 512MB PC running SRSS 4 on an unsupported Nevada build delivered via a 54MBps Wifi connection to a thin-client laptop. Do you see what I mean by "don't try this at home?"
I go back to the Wired VPN Sun Ray terminal to try to read email suggestions about my Gobi VPN problem. When turn around my 4-year-old is playing flash games on the Gobi. She has no idea this isn't a real laptop nor does she care that the PC it is displaying is hopelessly underpowered. In case you haven't guessed, Nintendo/Playstation and other hot and powerful video game boxes haven't yet entered our humble home. That might have set her expectations a bit high. We do give her toys though. And not just sock puppets and cattail dolls. Now that we've proven there is nothing wrong with Gobi's local connectivity, I'll have to pry it away from her so I can figure out how to connect the Gobi via VPN. But that's a story for another day.
Posted at 12:38PM Mar 19, 2008 by bnitz in Children |
Workaround for nautilus/panel crashes in Nevada 84, 85.
A number of people have encountered a bug which causes nautilus and panel to crash on login, preventing the desktop from being used.
The symptoms are:- Nautilus crashes immediately on login, bringing up bug-buddy dialog.
- Panel crashes immediately after the user clicks the Launch menu.
- Any application which makes use of gtk icons crashes.
The bug is only experienced on some hardware and may not occur on every install even on hardware where it fails. It is caused by a file access race condition during the post install phase. The file access conflict causes an ASSERT in the gtk-update-icon-cache which forces this application to core during install. The user is left with incomplete and corrupt icon cache which causes failures of all applications depending on the gtk icon cache.
The bug is described in more detail here: 6631419 - gtk-update-icon-cache dies on first boot after install/upgrade
Fortunately, there is a very simple workaround:- Login as root
- Run the following:
for d in /usr/share/icons/*; do [ -d $d ] && gtk-update-icon-cache --force $d; done
This bug is intermittent and is known to exist in Nevada build 84 and build 85. It may exist in earlier builds on some hardware. The GNOME community's decision to enable application cores on ASSERT may have made some of these subtle underlying problems suddenly become much more frequent and obvious. A fix for bug 6631419 is committed for Nevada build 86.
CORRECTION: There was a discussion over enabling fail on assert within the GNOME community, but no change was recently made. The behavior is that on unstable (odd numbered) versions of gnome-session, fail on assert is enabled, but on even numbered builds it isn't.
Posted at 12:26PM Mar 14, 2008 by bnitz in OpenSolaris | Comments[5]
