Thursday June 28, 2007

Solaris Companion DVD is my new best friend

Deciding that knowing how to use traditional UNIX tools is what separates the men from the boys in the software world, I last night embarked on a program of self-education on my experimental Solaris system. You never know when you might be stuck in Bazookastan with only a command line between you and certain death, so I want to be prepared. Bitmapped tools are for wimps.

First step: install Pine for reading email. I still haven't figured out how to compile open source programs from source, so I needed a compiled binary. Fortunately, I had hung on to the Solaris Companion DVD from one of my earlier Solaris forays. I popped it into the Dell's disk drive, and presto -- a world of nifty FOSS applications was at my fingertips. There was a cool little wizard that divided the apps into useful categories like publishing, networking, utilities and so forth. There is no index, which I found disconcerting, but if you select a category to install, then go to the next screen, it will tell you what is about to be installed. You can then backtrack and deselect the stuff you don't want by using the Custom Install choice.  I wound up selecting only Pine and Mutt.

Luckily, the install wizard tells you what directory the apps are going into, which is /opt/sfw/bin. I was worried that I was getting source and would have to compile, but they actually are binary executables. Excellent!

Then I made a classic newbie error. I cd'd to the install directory, and attempted to run both Pine and Mutt by typing in their names. Nothing happened. I resorted to the Java Desktop System file browser and clicked on them. Nothing happened. Rats! Was I supposed to run another install program before they would run, a la Windows? I was stumped.

I finally realized that I was still thinking like a Windows person. Once you step through the looking glass into the UNIX world, things are just... different. Counterintuitively, the fact that you are in the directory where an executable resides doesn't mean that you can run it. To run something, its directory has to be in your PATH. One of my Sun buddies, Raymond Tam, had explained this to me some time ago, but I had forgotten. When I finally remembered, I got out Steve Moritsugu's excellent Practical UNIX, and followed his instructions for adding /opt/sfw/bin to my PATH.

It worked! Well, sort of. I was able to bring up mutt, but pine seemed to be missing a library. I'll check the Companion DVD to see if I can find it there tonight.

Update: Actually, there is a way to add the current directory to your PATH, but it seems a little risky to me, so I didn't take that option. Of course, you can also run any UNIX application by specifying its full PATH when you invoke it.

Wednesday June 27, 2007

Sun Constellation System and Andy in NYT

Terrific article on the new supercomputer and The Man.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/technology/26sun.html 

Wednesday June 20, 2007

Solaris notebook compatibility

The more I use Solaris for my daily activities, the more I become convinced that one of its biggest barriers to widespread adoption by individual users is the issue of compatibility with the wide variety of notebooks out there. In the US, people are buying more notebooks than desktops, and the problem with notebooks is that they use a lot of really weird components in order to save space and weight. How can we support the myriad of new network cards, displays, Wi-fi cards, etc. that the manufacturers keep coming up with, not to mention the legacy hardware in use?

Microsoft solves the problem by throwing money at it. I'm sure they have hundreds of developers writing device drivers, and hundreds more who make sure that the manufacturers' own drivers work with Windows. Apple solves the problem by only supporting its own hardware. Linux has a large community of volunteer developers writing drivers.

The OpenSolaris community is vibrant, but small compared to the Linux community. When I was confronted with problems running Solaris on my notebook, I was fortunate that there is a community-written driver for my notebook's network card. I was also fortunate that a Sun developer in Beijing was assigned to write the AGPGART driver that makes my display function. Gabriel Carillo describes similar problems in a blog entry today.

One solution, of course, is to encourage the further development of a driver-writing community around OpenSolaris. Another solution, if Solaris is released under the GPL, would be to cooperate with the Linux community on developing common drivers. There is a third solution, however, that is only available to Sun. Since Sun does not manufacture notebooks, it does not compete in this market with Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo and the other notebook manaufacturers, which are very few in number. Sun also has corporate muscle that Linux doesn't have. Perhaps we could engage in some high-level diplomacy with these manufacturers to encourage them to write open source drivers for their components that would be compatible with Solaris.

Sunday June 17, 2007

Rebel Island rocks!

I recently finished Rick Riordan's Rebel Island, and it was terrific. I've written before about my admiration for Riordan's Tres Navarre series of Texas detective novels, and this one lives up to his high standards. I really enjoy when an author pays homage to another author's work by recycling one of her plots, but in a new and entertaining way. Actually, Riordan does a mashup of two famous works, Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None, and John Huston's film Key Largo. Both use the device of a group of people stranded at an isolated island hotel, who suddenly realize that there is a cold-blooded killer among them. Key Largo adds a violent hurricane into the mix.

In Rebel Island the island is off the Texas coast, beyond cell phone range, and a lot of the guests are hiding guilty secrets. Between a murderer on the loose and hurricane-driven waves washing over the island, will anybody live to see the dawn?

I got my hands on an advance copy, but the regular edition will be published August 28. Plenty of time for you to read the first six books in the series before you set sail for Rebel Island.

Saturday June 16, 2007

Ollalieberry Pie - yum!

BW and I stopped in at Pie 'n Burger in Pasadena today to pick up our annual Ollalieberry pie. Ollalieberries are sort of like blackberries, only better. Ollalieberry pies are seldom available outside of Southern California, and their season is very short, so you have to snatch one when you can. We think Pie 'n Burger has the best ones. Sun's Monrovia office is near Pasadena, so if you happen to visit here in the month of June, treat yourself to a slice. I'll go with you.

Wednesday June 13, 2007

Linus Torvalds on Solaris

Wow! Linus talking positively about Solaris, and about Jonathan, too! This is way cool.

Here's the link to the article on CNET. 

Update: now that I've seen the source, Linus's remarks weren't all positive. But I choose to focus on the nice parts, and apparently Jonathan does, too.

Back in the OpenSolaris saddle

After a long hiatus, I recently revived my Solaris-at-home experiment. Deciding to act like an absolute tourist to see how a consumer who wanted to try Solaris would be treated by Sun, I ordered the OpenSolaris starter kit online. It took about five weeks to arrive, which I thought was pretty good fulfillment for a free offer. It turned out to be a two-DVD set, one DVD labeled as Solaris Express Community Edition, build 57, and the other with some tutorials and LiveCDs of the Belenix, Schillix and Nexenta distros.

The packaging was pretty slick, quite tasteful, but I missed having written instructions of any sort. I guess I'm too much of a print-oriented guy. I glanced at the tutorial, but got impatient and decided to go straight to the DVD install.

The install went very well. It seemed to have been made easier and simpler than the last time I installed, which was build 42. Also, it gave a nice running commentary about what additional products, drivers and so on it was installing. I don't remember build 42 doing that. I was happy to see that the beloved (by me) AGPGART driver was being installed, since it is essential to the proper functioning of the display on my Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop.

Since I was upgrading from build 42, I tried the "upgrade" option, but couldn't make it work, since it kept looking for a file in which to back up existing data, then couldn't find one that wasn't being upgraded itself, which it refused to do. I'm sure there's a way around this, but I couldn't figure it out, so I went with the "new install" option. I didn't have any data on the machine anyway, so it was no loss, and probably beneficial in that it wiped out some of the doubtful modifications I'd done in my last experiments.

Although it's not labeled on the packaging, build 57 includes the new OpenSolaris Developer Edition that has all the developer tools. I tried installing this, but it wouldn't let me, saying my 1 gig of memory was too small. Oh well. It was easy to click on going with the standard edition instead, and that worked fine. I'm not a developer, so what the hell.

I was also happy to see that the bug in build 42 that prevented me from logging in with the Xsun X-server has been fixed, and the default Xorg server works just fine -- no need to apply the patch that the OpenSolaris guys had kindly given me before. Given all the X-related problems I've had in the past, this was a great relief. Interestingly, when I ran kdmconfig to switch to Xsun, just to see if it would work, the screen resolution degraded considerably. Sun has deprecated Xsun anyway, but it's nice to know that it's still included and at least functional in the distro.

My big complaint is that there still is no driver for my laptop's Broadcom bcm4401 network card, and I had to turn to my buddy Hermelito Go to install the mysterious Japanese driver that I've downloaded and used before. It took Hermelito, a veteran Unix sysadmin, several minutes to get that installed, so it's not a trivial operation. Hermelito pointed out that the card is quite common, so he thinks OpenSolaris may actually contain a driver for it, but can't detect that it's there.

 Beyond these quibbles, I'm pretty happy with this latest incarnation of OpenSolaris. I'm going to make an effort to use it for a lot of my daily tasks, and I hope to report to you now and then how it's working for me. 

Monday June 04, 2007

Free and Open Source License Comparison

You can use this chart to compare the major attributes of the most popular Free and Open Source Software licenses. I have been researching the major licenses, and it's hard to keep the differences between them straight, at least for me, so I prepared this chart that you may find useful. Those of you who know about this subject, please feel free to offer comments. I will revise the chart from time to time in the light of what I learn from you.

Update 6 June 2007: In response to the kind comment from Mads I have removed the "specify the same license version" clause as an attribute of the Apache License. I am beginning to think that Apache should really be classified as a Permissive license.