Jyothi's Weblog

Playing with OpenSolaris Desktop Settings

If you have not yet tried Compiz on OpenSolaris, you should certainly check it out on the latest OpenSolaris release (2009.06 release is only weeks away). The development builds , of course are available at pkg.opensolaris.org/dev. As with all dev builds, use at your own risk though There have been many blogs about Compiz, here is a link to get you started:
http://blogs.sun.com/observatory/entry/fun_with_visual_effects_compiz

After you have your Compiz settings in place , and tried the Ctrl- Alt - arrow keys combination, you might see that your previous windows have disappeared...but of course they haven't. Try the same combination of keys and "browse" through the Compiz windows till you get back your previous desktop! This is addictive and you could end up spending hours adjusting and playing with these settings.You can adjust your Compiz settings by clicking on the Preferences tab under Visual Effects.

Also try out the new desktop settings (System->Appearance or right-click on the desktop) which have some really cool colors and designs!

I adjusted these screenshots using the GIMP image editor. The image editor is available as a package in the http://pkg.opensolaris.org/release  repository. I used the Package Manager to download this package.

After a successful installation, I launched the image editor application from  /usr/bin/. More on the desktop settings and Package Manager in my next blogs.

Posted at 11:49AM May 11, 2009 by Jyothi Srinath in Sun  | 

Back to blogging

It's been many months since I blogged, but the approaching Community One and Java One conferences has got my blogging fingers going again.

See http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone/2009/west/index.jsp  and http://java.sun.com/javaone/  for registration and other 

event-related information.There's going to be an OpenSolaris booth  at the conferences of course. 

Many at Sun are blogging about the new release, and you can find a list of the many blogs at http://opensolaris.org/os/blogs/.

I read a couple of interesting blogs on Cnet news about opensource software. This one is very heartening to read -

 http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10223005-16.html?subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20&part=sphere

And this one is certainly a good topic for some animated discussion - 

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10233715-16.html?tag=mncol;posts

Looking forward to an interesting summer as the OpenSolaris 2009.06 release gets ready to roll out at the end of the month.

Posted at 02:34PM May 06, 2009 by Jyothi Srinath in Sun  | 

Burning a data DVD from Virtual Box

I wanted to upgrade from OpenSolaris 2008.05 running in VirtualBox to the latest OpenSolaris development build. After downloading the iso image , I wanted to burn it on a DVD. Since I am running the 2008.05 release, many of the applications, such as cdrw , have to be downloaded from the repository. I used the Package Manager (the GUI for the Image Packaging System) to download the SUNWcdrw package. The Package Manager can be started via System->Administration->Package Manager. Or, at the command line, type:

$ packagemanager &

However I got this error when using cdrw.

And this was because I had not set the correct setting for the CD/DVD before starting Virtual Box.
To get VirtualBox to recognize your CD/DVD, do the following:
Before starting VirtualBox, goto Settings->CD/DVD-ROM->MountCD/DVD Drive(Enable Passthrough is checked)->Click OK.

Now when I start VirtualBox, it has no problem detecting the CD-DVD drive.

Posted at 02:47PM Aug 14, 2008 by Jyothi Srinath in Sun  |  Comments[1]

A BOSUG meet

I attended a BOSUG (Bangalore OpenSolaris Users Group) meet while in Bangalore. Deirdre Straughan gave an informal talk about video blogging and there is a blog already posted about this by another BOSUG attendee. Suffice to say that video blogging sounds really cool and worth investing some of our time and resources on it.

Posted at 02:27AM Jun 19, 2008 by Jyothi Srinath in Sun  | 

Developer tools packages on OpenSolaris repository

There are various developer packages available for download on the OpenSolaris repository - http://pkg.opensolaris.org.
Among them are Sun Studio, Webstack and NetBeans packages. 

1. sunstudioexpress - This package comprises of Sun Studio Express 5/08 that is available only to OpenSolaris 2008.05 users. This is the most current release of Sun Studio, i.e. it is newer than the Sun Studio 12 release, but has limited support. See the README for information specific to this release.
2.  sunstudio - This package consists of Sun Studio 12 software.
3. ss-dev - This package has a number of sub-packages within it, the sunstudioexpress package being one of them.Other sub-packages include the development tools for JDK 6.0, automake, libtool etc. For a complete list, see this table.
There have been various discussions regarding downloading and installing Sun Studio on Nevada build 90. See this thread for details.
4.amp-dev - This package consists of all the web stack packages, Apache, MySql, Perl/PHP/Python. See this table for a list of the individual components and their versions.
5. netbeans - Superset of all the NetBeans packages. The individual components are listed here.

Note that the "super-set" package clusters (ss-dev,amp-dev and netbeans) can take some time to download depending on your bandwidth, all the individual components can also be downloaded separately.

Posted at 02:06AM Jun 19, 2008 by Jyothi Srinath in Sun  |  Comments[1]