Random footnotes of Engineering

I'm a little ashamed to admit that I still use Ubuntu quite a bit on my laptop. I have switched over to using OpenSolaris for some building and kicking the tires, but most of my Solaris development has been done on an external machine. So I decided what are some of the things that I would need to do in order to switch over full time to running full time on OpenSolaris.

So what laptop am I using? I actually use a Sony SZ460N which I _love_:

Installing OpenSolaris on this worked fine, the only thing I needed to add was the Marvell Yukon driver for the built in ethernet. I'm not going to cover installing on this Laptop since I did it a while back and it was so totally painless ;-)

One of the most important needs for me was to be able to access other filesystems. By a quirk of Vista it's very difficult to reduce the size of the partition. I managed to do it, but can't get it to be less than 80GB in size (on a 160GB HD). So I use that to store my MP3s. That means if I want music I need to be able to mount and read NTFS. I also still have a bunch of useful data under Linux on ext3, so that means I need something at least that will read ext2/ext3.

This led me down the path of investigating FUSE for Solaris. Fortunately there is an OpenSolaris project, so I just downloaded the code. After a bit of futzing around with PATH I managed to get it to build. It required Sun Studio 11 to build the kernel bits and I built the userland bits with Sun Studio Express. I did need to change some of the build flags to handle being 64bit. I then turned my attention to the filesystems. So from the project page it points out the two filesystems I was interested in:

• ntfs
  
• ext2fuse
  

I managed to get both building fine. Once built the ntfs fuse filesystem worked fine. However I didn't manage to get ext2fuse to do anything. I'll dig up the error and send it on to the team. My suspicion is that it's related to the fact my ext3 filesystem is on an extended partition.

I did some further digging around and came across a blog posting discussing filesystems specifically. It points to two packages that if you download and install everything seems to work great.

So this is essentially two options that you have to mount existing non-Solaris based filesystems.