Lukas Rovensky's Weblog: Lukas Rovensky's Weblog

I tried to install today OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 in Parallels Desktop 3.0 virtual machine. The installation went without any problems and I was able to get the network up and running using the method I described at OpenSolaris Developer Preview / Indiana on MacBook entry. The only extra step needed was to reboot the machine and then the network started to work.

I finally found some time to play a bit more with the NSLU2 (Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives) from Linksys I bought many months ago.

Originally I used an old IBM Deskstar PATA hard drive, which I installed in Icy Box external case and connected to NSLU2. I also flashed NSLU2 with the Unslug firmware. I followed carefully all instructions at the Unslug web and everything worked fine including installation of a NFS server on the NSLU2 to be able to access the shared disk easily from Solaris boxes. Note, that NSLU2 is primarily intended for Windows users, so the default network file system support is limited only to SMB/CIFS protocol (Samba). This solution was OK for occasional backups and sharing data among computers on the home network (the old hard drive did not have too much capacity and was quite noisy).

Before Christmas I bought a new shiny Western Digital hard drive with much bigger capacity than the old disk. The goal was to use this disk not only for backups but also for sharing iTunes music and iPhoto library by the computers at home (mostly Mac's).

The iPhoto library was quite simple -- I just copied the library itself on the shared disk and then used the "option-open" feature of iPhoto (hold the option (alt) key when opening iPhoto), which makes possible to select a library to be used by iPhoto. This solution has one disadvantage -- only one user can work with the iPhoto data but this is not a problem for now.

Sharing iTunes was a bit more difficult and as the best solution turned out to be mt-daapd server (now re-branded as Firefly Media Server). I use one of the computers at home as primary source for the iTunes music and on as-needed basis I rsync the local data to the shared drive, so it can be used by iTunes running on other machines.

rsync is also used for backing up user's data.

Students of Technical University of Vienna visited Czech Republic and as part of their program they also visited Prague Engineering Center (PEC). We have prepared for them a series of presentations, starting with information about Sun and PEC and continuing with OpenSolaris, NetBeans, and Glassfish. I had the opportunity to present about Introduction to OpenSolaris. This event was very interesting for me because of the following reasons:

• It was the first time when I presented together with people from other engineering groups in Prague.
• We talked about important part of Sun's software portfolio and all products we discussed are open source.
• The students had interesting questions -- not too much technical but mostly economical -- how Sun can make money from software when almost all our products are open sourced and people can start to use them for free. So, instead of answering questions about ZFS, DTrace, etc., I talked about Sun's strategy in this space. It proved to be very good to have a CEO who blogs and read what he writes about .

Me presenting:

Geertjan presents about NetBeans:

I installed the last week the OpenSolaris Developer Preview / Indiana inside Paralles Desktop 3.0 running on MacBook Pro laptop (see my post concerning installing SXCE for details about setting up the virtual machine).

Booting the LiveCD went very well and the auto-login worked for me. I booted the system from real CD not just an iso image and I was quite impressed by the speed of the boot process. Then I started the actual installation and again, everything went smooth.

The last thing I had to do was to install the network drivers. This required mounting the /Library/Parallels/Tools/vmtools.iso (set the vmtools.iso at the Edit/Virtual Machine.../CD/DVD-ROM Options/Image File and reboot the virtual machine). The device driver is located at /media/PRTOOLS/Drivers/Network/RTL8029/SOLARIS. The recommended method to install the driver is to use the network.sh script. However, this script builds the driver from source code and since the Indiana preview does not contain C compiler this method did not work. So, I read the README.txt, network.sh, unpacked the sources and found that the binaries are also provided. I looked also in the makefiles to find out details about installing the driver and here are the steps, which worked for me:

• Use prtconf to verify that the RTL8029 card is recognized, look for pci10ec,8029 under pci, instance #0.
• Log as a root.
• unzip and untar the ni0.8.11.tar: # gunzip ni0.8.11.tgz; tar xvf ni0.8.11.tar
• Use addni.sh script (part of the unpacked sources) to add the new driver to the system.
• Install the driver binaries to the /kernel/drv directory -- invoke the following commands from the directory with unpacked sources:
  • # /usr/sbin/install -f /kernel/drv -m 755 -u root -g sys i386/dp8390
  • # /usr/sbin/install -f /kernel/drv -m 755 -u root -g sys i386/ni
• Wait a few seconds and the Network Auto-Magic magically picks the driver up, plumbs the interface and starts DHCP for you.

After a few months pause two CZOSUG meetings were organized in October -- CZOSUG BootCamp (October 20th) and the first CZOSUG meeting in Brno (October 23rd).

The all-day BootCamp focused on application tuning and debugging on OpenSolaris and many people from Solaris RPE team presented there (big thanks to Peter Harvey, Milos Muzik, Vita Batrla, Sasa Nedvedicky, Pavel Filipensky, and Zdenek Kotala). Thanks also to Faculty of Mathematics and Physisc, Charles University for hosting this event.

The CZOSUG #20 run at Masaryk University, Faculty of Informatics. I had there a presentation about "Introduction to OpenSolaris" (slides are in Czech) followed by very nice demo of DTrace, ZFS and BrandZ delivered by Milan Jurik. Thanks to Roumen for organizing this event. The CZOSUG meeting followed a CZJUG meeting, so we (the OpenSolaris community) were able to leverage the contacts Rouman has from his for as NetBeans evangelist.

After I installed SXCE on MacBook Pro using Parallels I ended up with resolution 1024 x 768 points. This is nice but native resolution of the 15 inches MacBook Pro laptop is 1440 x 900 pixels, so the next step was to make the SXCE use the native resolution for SXDE in full screen mode.

I found two useful links -- one at Parallels Forum and another at DraginFly site, which helped me to get the native resolution. Here are the steps I followed:

• Log as super user and copy file /etc/X11/.xorg.conf to file /etc/X11/xorg.conf
• Edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf as the following:
  • In the section "Monitor" add rows:
    HorizSync 31.5 - 100.0
VertRefresh 59.0 - 75.0
Option "dpms"
Modeline "1440x900" 108.84 1440 1472 1800 1912 900 918 927 946
  • In the section "Screen" add row: DefaultDepth 24
  • For each subsection "Display" you want to use in the section "Screen" add a new resolution "1440x900" at the begin in the Modes line. For example:
    Modes "1440x900" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
  • Reboot.