Tuesday August 23, 2005
Tuesday August 23, 2005
More baby steps
I've been kind of busy lately what with flying to Canada and such so that I haven't done much more on my new home server ( wiz
) running Solaris 10 which I aim to someday replace my old
decrepit linux server. I was going to talk about the problem with
drivers which I'm sure is the biggest impediment anyone attempting the
switch encounters but first a paragraph or two on a different problem.
When I first got wiz running I
needed to download some patches and some new packages as the first
order of business. So I fired up firefox where the display should pop
up on my powerbook. Unfortunately it died almost immediately with an
error from X (BadWindow). So I
tried mozilla, same thing. Well that is disappointing. So then I fired
up a vnc server on the Solaris machine and connected to it with Chicken of the VNC
from my laptop. From there I tried firefox again. Worked fine. Well
that is kind of disappointing but at least I have a workaround. Sure
wanted to fix it though because vnc performance just isn't that good.
Eventually I went about debugging it and I discovered that the error
occurred while querying the Xinerama extension for screen parameters.
So my next workaround was to turn of Xinerama on the macintosh side.
This let me skip using vnc but was still kind of klunky because I had
to start X by hand instead of with the gui. So I investigated further.
In orger to do that I wanted to examine the packets being sent back and
forth from the X server and client. I got a copy of ethereal
and snooped the packets. I couldn't really tell what was going wrong
but at least I expected I could ask someone here at Sun that worked on
the X server if they could tell me if the problem was on the Solaris
side or the mac side.
Working outside of California and being in the Java VM group I didn't
really know anyone in the group supporting X. By a little bit of
investigation I identified someone and sent a long detailed email along
with an attachment that held the decoded packets. In about 1 minute I
get a reply back. "This is:
Bug 6216985 Xsun & Xorg Xinerama protocols are incompatible with each other
Install patch 119060-04 to fix it."
By dumb luck I picked the developer that worked on the bug! How
is that for service. (BTW the patch for sparc is 119059-04).
I installed the patch on wiz and it worked perfectly. Yeah! No need for a workaround.
Aug 23 2005, 01:26:44 PM EDT
Permalink
Comments:
Post a Comment:
Comments are closed for this entry.