Wednesday June 16, 2004
Modernizing my desktop This morning I upgraded the OS on my SunBlade 2000 from Solaris 9 to Solaris 10 build 58. The process went smoothly after I allowed it to do a fresh install instead of an upgrade. As a result of that choice, quite a few locally installed apps were missing, so I installed pkg-get from BlastWave. Wow was that a great recommendation. After a problem free install of pkg-get, I just issued this command:
pkg-get -i gaim
to get gaim (Aol Instant Messanger for Gnome) installed. If a new version of gaim becomes avialable, all I have to do is:
pkg-get -u gaim
I did have to make an alias in my .cshrc to get BlastWave's required LD_LIBRARY_PATH set:
alias gaim 'setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /opt/csw/lib;/opt/csw/bin/gaim'
pkg-get detects all the dependencies that are missing from your system, connects to the web to download them and installs them. It is a huge productivity enhancement. The list of available packages is impressive
I was also able to simply hot-swap a Logitech USB scroll wheel mouse for the Sun standard 3 button mouse and it worked without any tinkering thanks to built-in support in Solaris 10. Under Solaris 9 I had to install a driver and hack configs that I must have messed up badly since it only worked until I had hard crash (never try to open the case of your SunBlade 2000 while its running - a kill switch promtly cuts power to the system). After the crash, I had to remove the mouse driver to get my system to restart.
Well, I'm off to play with DTrace, the primary reason I upgraded to Solaris 10... (2004-06-16 11:07:29.0)
Permalink
Comments [3]
