vi-curious Gary J Little's Weblog

WindowMaker Prefs

For some reason the Windowmaker install I installed from blastwave.org doesn't have the preference application available in the menu. If you have the same problem you can find the binary here

/opt/csw/GNUstep/Applications/WPrefs.app/WPrefs

And from there you can add Wprefs to the menu if you want. I had a hard time finding this out, since everything I googled for 'windowmaker menu' returned data about wmprefs ( Apr 15 2005, 01:15:53 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Windowmaker on S10 x86

So, a bunch of us were bitching about the bloat and slowness of GNOME - and before you spam me, personally I find GNOME bloated and slow. It's my opinion, and I'm entitled to it. Anyhow, I decided to do something about it, and install Windowmaker and see how it compared.

As it turned out, this was a lot simpler than I imagined. FYI, here's how I did it....

1) Go to blastwave and download the pkg-get application. Install it on your workstation using pkgadd.
2) Edit your /etc/pkg-get.conf appropriately. By default it will look to sunfreeware.com, which gets very busy. I changed mine as below. Add in your proxy server if required.

# See http://www.sunfreeware.com/ftp.html for other mirrors
#url=http://mirrors.xmission.com/sunfreeware

# North american site for CSW packages, instead of sunfreeware ones
url=http://ibiblio.org/pub/packages/solaris/csw/unstable/

3) Run the pkg-get binary, to get a catalog. ./pkg-get -U My binary is in /opt/csw/bin
4) Type pkg-get -i windowmaker The pkg-get magic, automatically gets all the required packages for you and installs in the right order.
5) Once finished you'll want to have Windowmaker appear in the list of available window managers at the desktop login screen.
6) Simply follow this script, you can directly cut and paste the text files linked off of the page.
7) Logout of your existing window manager, and login under windowmaker.

That's it. ( Apr 08 2005, 05:20:00 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [2]

Grand National on Solaris

Those in the UK will probably know that it's the Grand National tomorrow. FWIW. According to netcraft.com, the online bookmaker BlueSquare BlueSquare is running Solaris 9. Glad I'm not on-call. ( Apr 08 2005, 04:53:42 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Truss is easily fooled.

Was talking to Tim U about an Oracle TNSlistener problem that we had a timestamped truss for. It turns out that that I'd misunderstood the timestamps, and I suspect I'm not the only one. Tim has a concise explanation in his blog, but since I like to see this stuff in action (Ruth tells me this makes me a Kinesthetic learner) here is a simple example. We have a short program that does an open/close, then a big loop doing arithmetic in userland and then another open/close.

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

int  main()
{
 int c,d,i,x;

 c=open(".",O_RDONLY);
 close(c);
 x=0;d=0;
 int *ptr;
 ptr=&d;
 for (i=0;i<9999999;i++)
 {
  for (i=0;i<99999999;i++)
   {
    x=i+1;
    *ptr=x;
   }
 }

 c=open(".",O_RDONLY);
 close(c);
 return(0);

}

The resulting truss shows that the second 'open()' took over one second, to open the same file which previously took <10 msec truss -Dd

 0.0183  0.0002 setustack(0xFF3A2088)
 0.0193  0.0010 open(".", O_RDONLY)                             = 3
 0.0198  0.0005 close(3)                                        = 0
 1.5498  1.5300 open(".", O_RDONLY)                             = 3
 1.5503  0.0005 close(3)                                        = 0
 1.5511  0.0008 _exit(0)

In reality the time was spent in userland doing the large loop, but all we see in truss -Dd is the time between the last close and the next open. By changing the loops to be smaller we change the output thus:

 0.0168  0.0002 setustack(0xFF3A2088)
 0.0177  0.0009 open(".", O_RDONLY)                             = 3
 0.0182  0.0005 close(3)                                        = 0
 0.0194  0.0012 open(".", O_RDONLY)                             = 3
 0.0199  0.0005 close(3)                                        = 0
 0.0203  0.0004 _exit(0)

Prior to Solaris 10, there's not much that can be done about that, but being aware of how truss calculates the values is at least a start. With Solaris 10, and -E option we get a much better representation of what's going on. truss -Ed

 0.0243  0.0001 setustack(0xFF3A2088)
 0.0254  0.0004 open(".", O_RDONLY)                             = 3
 0.0266  0.0000 close(3)                                        = 0
 1.6171  0.0004 open(".", O_RDONLY)                             = 3
 1.6178  0.0000 close(3)                                        = 0
 1.6184  0.0000 _exit(0)

( Apr 07 2005, 11:59:52 AM BST ) Permalink Comments [1]

googleplex

Spend an hour watching one of googles eggheads talk about the innards of the worlds favourite search engine here, grab a cuppa and a stale hot-cross-bun, relax and be educated. Talking of google, just checking the refers to this blog, shows that right now Google is the internet. I reckon there's a good book to be written on how Altavista managed to blow it so badly. The remaining legacy seems to be astalavista the similarly named 'security' related search engine. ( Apr 06 2005, 08:44:13 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Erins first bike ride.

We took this movie of Erin learning to ride her bike this weekend. Taken using movie mode on our Ixus V. It's in Windows media format, and seems to play best in the native media player. Erins first bike ride ( Apr 06 2005, 08:35:31 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [1]