My manager is at Director Charm School (tm) this week so I decided to spend a big chunk of my work-from-home day playing with OpenSolaris. I have an x64 box to work with, and an ISO image of the May release of OpenSolaris, which I got via BitTorrent (I try to be a good citizen by keeping that image on my list of files to share, so that other people on the net can download OpenSolaris as quickly as I was able to). I decided to install from that image, then see what it was like to update my system to bring me the latest set of software.
Installing was easy; it took about 25 minutes. I liked that it was both easy and relatively quick.
Then I logged in and looked for the application that lets me update my system. That was tougher to find, and not obvious. On Ubuntu, it's one of the top-level menu items, labeled "Add/Remove..." in the "Applications" menu. On OpenSolaris, it's under the Administration menu, labeled "Package Manager". I wish it were labeled by what it does, not what it is. (in other words, call the menu choice "Update My System" instead of "Package Manager", which is less accessible terminology)
Anyway, I launched the app and asked it to update everything it thought it needed to update (pressing the "Update All" button). The tool told me it needed to download about 4GB of stuff (actually, it told me it needed to download about 40375289 KB of stuff, which was harder for me to understand). So I told it to do the update.
It started downloading content (my home networking is pretty fast Comcast broadband so big downloads don't scare me). About a quarter of the way through (yes, after downloading about a GB), it stalled, then timed out. That took about 10-15 minutes, and it sucked.
So I quit the updater^H^H^H^H^H^H^HPackage Manager and re-launched it, then chose only a couple of packages to update. Those little updates went well, so I got brave again and picked a larger bunch. Again, the downloading stalled, this time aobut 65MB into the process. I tried again, stalling again during download. This was starting to get annoying.
Finally, I picked a different set of packages (a small set again) and it installed fine. I got brave again, picked about 1GB worth of stuff to install/upgrade, and when the downloading started, I went to lunch.
When I came back, the screen was blank (screensaver activated). I pressed the Shift key to bring up the screensaver's login panel so I could get back to my work. Instead, I got this message:
ld.so.1: xscreensaver-lock: fatal: libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: open failed: No such file or directory
ld.so.1; xscreensaver-lock: fatal: /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: corrupt or truncated file
In other words, the screensaver program wouldn't let me log back into my desktop. So I logged in remotely and killed it. Then I tried to launch the Package Manager program again. It started to launch, then died.
I tried to launch the Terminal application; it also wouldn't launch.
I then tried to reboot the machine; it died during its boot sequence.
I tried again; it died again; the machine's OS install was corrupted.
I am writing this blog entry while re-installing OpenSolaris, and updating packages in little, bite-sized pieces.
Bleh. This is not fun at all.
Next: the pain of filing an OpenSolaris bug report. That was equally difficult, and I'm not even sure I filed it in the right place, because apparently there are at least two places for outsiders to file bugs against OpenSolaris. How is that good?
Installing was easy; it took about 25 minutes. I liked that it was both easy and relatively quick.
Then I logged in and looked for the application that lets me update my system. That was tougher to find, and not obvious. On Ubuntu, it's one of the top-level menu items, labeled "Add/Remove..." in the "Applications" menu. On OpenSolaris, it's under the Administration menu, labeled "Package Manager". I wish it were labeled by what it does, not what it is. (in other words, call the menu choice "Update My System" instead of "Package Manager", which is less accessible terminology)
Anyway, I launched the app and asked it to update everything it thought it needed to update (pressing the "Update All" button). The tool told me it needed to download about 4GB of stuff (actually, it told me it needed to download about 40375289 KB of stuff, which was harder for me to understand). So I told it to do the update.
It started downloading content (my home networking is pretty fast Comcast broadband so big downloads don't scare me). About a quarter of the way through (yes, after downloading about a GB), it stalled, then timed out. That took about 10-15 minutes, and it sucked.
So I quit the updater^H^H^H^H^H^H^HPackage Manager and re-launched it, then chose only a couple of packages to update. Those little updates went well, so I got brave again and picked a larger bunch. Again, the downloading stalled, this time aobut 65MB into the process. I tried again, stalling again during download. This was starting to get annoying.
Finally, I picked a different set of packages (a small set again) and it installed fine. I got brave again, picked about 1GB worth of stuff to install/upgrade, and when the downloading started, I went to lunch.
When I came back, the screen was blank (screensaver activated). I pressed the Shift key to bring up the screensaver's login panel so I could get back to my work. Instead, I got this message:
ld.so.1: xscreensaver-lock: fatal: libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: open failed: No such file or directory
ld.so.1; xscreensaver-lock: fatal: /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: corrupt or truncated file
In other words, the screensaver program wouldn't let me log back into my desktop. So I logged in remotely and killed it. Then I tried to launch the Package Manager program again. It started to launch, then died.
I tried to launch the Terminal application; it also wouldn't launch.
I then tried to reboot the machine; it died during its boot sequence.
I tried again; it died again; the machine's OS install was corrupted.
I am writing this blog entry while re-installing OpenSolaris, and updating packages in little, bite-sized pieces.
Bleh. This is not fun at all.
Next: the pain of filing an OpenSolaris bug report. That was equally difficult, and I'm not even sure I filed it in the right place, because apparently there are at least two places for outsiders to file bugs against OpenSolaris. How is that good?
Posted at 03:55PM Jul 30, 2008
by drapeau in General
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Be sure to read the Release Notes
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/indiana/resources/rn3/
after installing OpenSolaris 2008.05. Following the initial steps will lead to a much more pleasant experience with the packaging CLI and the GUI will be fixed shortly.
Posted by David Comay on July 30, 2008 at 05:03 PM PDT #
Thanks, David. I'll try that now.
Meanwhile, I tried to do the install just as I did when I installed Ubuntu on my home machine: no reading, just download the ISO image, burn it, install it, and do what it tells me to do to get the distro up-to-date. I didn't have to read any release notes to get that done, so I tried to apply the same approach to installing OpenSolaris.
By the way, I did this all again from scratch, installing OpenSolaris then using the PackageManager to install a bunch of updated packages. This time it successfully downloaded a little over 3GB of content. It also installed/upgraded the packages.
The bad news: when the update was done and I tried to reboot the machine, it got stuck in a reboot loop. The OS won't come up now. And all I did was what the Package Manager told me to do.
That's not so good.
Posted by George Drapeau on July 30, 2008 at 05:22 PM PDT #
Agreed which is why we're working on addressing those issues. At this exact time, I would recommend not using the Package Manager and instead follow the release notes and use the pkg(1) command.
Posted by David Comay on July 30, 2008 at 05:25 PM PDT #
Okay. I'll R the FM and use pkg(1).
Dude, you're breaking my heart.
P.S.: I didn't even notice the "Read me before installing" message on the download page. I saw the big, shiny "Download" arrow button, but didn't read to the bottom of that column.
Maybe this is a silly suggestion, but how about something in a bit larger text that says "Problems installing or upgrading? Read this." Until the out-of-ISO-image experience gets to the foolproof place the group is going, I'm okay knowing that I may not be alone in having some glitches, and that the OpenSolaris folks are aware and have help ready to go. I think it's more clear than "Read me before installing" which I tend to take as optional, or advisory, but doesn't imply to me that I will have problems with install or upgrade.
Thanks again for the help; I'm typing this as my 3rd install from scratch completes. I'm getting really good at installing from CD.
Posted by George Drapeau on July 30, 2008 at 05:43 PM PDT #
Hey George.
Unfortunately 2008.05 shipped with a pretty bad set of bugs in pkg(1) which is causing a lot of grief for everyone - I won't go into the details too much, but essentially to avoid an unpleasant experience, you need to update the version of SUNWipkg as detailed in the release notes.
You're absolutely right about the Package Manager - we probably didn't do as good a job as we could have all hoped. It's a great start, but the application uses a lot of pkg(1) internals, and unfortunately breaks with updates to the SUNWipkg package - hence why David's suggesting you stick to just using pkg(1) for now.
I also completely agree that the user experience in general really sucks. One thing you may or may not be aware of is the fact that you can easily rollback your system. ZFS is the default file-system, and we've set it up so that it snapshots your system with each image-update. This allows an easy way of rolling back your system. If for some reason you can't seem to get it to boot, try using the LiveCD to mount your drive and perform the roll back that way?
I'll work on trying to get opensolaris.com updated with a more visible link to the release notes. I agree it's not in the best place (nor may not have the best layout).
We should be doing better with our next release, due out in November, OpenSolaris 2008.11. Thanks for the feedback - it's useful to know what our users are hitting.
Posted by Glynn Foster on July 30, 2008 at 06:52 PM PDT #
Actually Glynn, one of the major bugs in the packagemanager gui is that it *doesn't* create alternate boot environments so you can't use ZFS rollback.
The cli is really the way to go for now.
Posted by Shawn Walker on July 30, 2008 at 09:58 PM PDT #
See also http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=2658 -- we're driving a message into image-update to tell the user to pay attention to the release notes.
Posted by 192.18.43.225 on July 31, 2008 at 02:05 AM PDT #
Shawn, can you point me to an example of doing a ZFS rollback after doing a pkg install? As a test, I just did a pkg install to upgrade my version of Firefox. However, running zfs list doesn't show any new snapshots and beadm list doesn't show any new boot environments. How would I rollback this upgrade?
Posted by Brian Leonard on August 05, 2008 at 07:46 AM PDT #
Hi Gman,
Long time no see. I ran into problems with the Package Manager only last night, being a CLI type of guy. So far, most of my effort, after installing OpenSolaris in the VirtualBox 2.0 on my Dell laptop (with 4G RAM), has been focused on getting the ssh configured in a passwordless manner, exactly like Ubuntu 8.04's default setup (gnome-keyring-manager + seahorse, both called from /etc/gdm/Xsession). But darn! OpenSolaris doesn't provide anything like the seahorse :( So, I probably will have to use xterm -e instead :)
At any rate, I just started using Package Manager last night, and it wouldn't launch. Checking /usr/bin/, I found this Python blob /usr/bin/packagemanager. Invoking it on command line as root, I got:
# Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/packagemanager", line 1601, in ?
a = packagemanager.get_image_from_directory("/")
File "/usr/bin/packagemanager", line 1233, in get_image_from_directory
pkgs_known = [ pf for pf in
AttributeError: 'Image' object has no attribute 'gen_known_package_fmris'
So, not good.
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=69623&tstart=-1 is another one that ran into the same problem.
In the meantime, has anyone come up any solutions/patches so far?
Seeya.
Cman, your pal
Posted by C. Fang on September 12, 2008 at 09:55 AM PDT #
Hi Gman,
Well, a simple
$pkg image-update and then adjust the grub fixed the problem.
$ uname -a
SunOS opensolaris 5.11 snv_97 i86pc i386 i86pc Solaris
Not bad :)
Cman
Posted by C. Fang on September 12, 2008 at 06:38 PM PDT #