Lukas Rovensky's Weblog: Lukas Rovensky's Weblog

I recently started to play with Django and the first task was actually to set it up on all the platforms I am currently using (SXCE (build 96), OpenSolaris 2008.11 (RC2) and Mac OS X 10.5). The setup was not difficult and the mighty internet helped to answer all my questions but since the setup steps differ on each of the platforms I decided to write down what I learned.

My goal was to set up Django development environment with MySQL database. Django is a Python based web development framework, so the complete list of tools is as the following:

• Python
• MySQLdb -- MySQL API for Python
• gcc -- used to compile part of the MySQLdb
• MySQL
• Django

OpenSolaris

All the required packages are available, so the setup was just a matter of issuing a few IPS commands.

MySQL 5 is installed by command $ pfexec pkg install SUNwmysql5. It is installed in /usr/mysql. It is controlled by SMF, so to start the MySQL server it is necessary to enable it at first. This can be done either through a command line ($ pfexec svcadm enable mysql) or through a GUI tool (go to System/Administration/Services for a GUI tool, which shows available services and makes possible to enable or disable them).

Python version 2.4.4 is installed by default. MySQLdb is packaged as SUNWmysql-python package, so it gets installed by issuing $ pfexec pkg install SUNWmysql-python.

Django package also exists but it is stored in webstack repository, so this repository has to be added to a list of known authorities:
$ pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/webstack webstack
$ pfexec pkg refresh
$ pfexec pkg install Django

It is also a good idea to add MySQL in the PATH, e.g., $ export PATH=$PATH:/usr/mysql/bin

SXCE (build 96)

MySQL 5, MySQLdb, and Python are already installed, so only Django needed to be set up. I just downloaded the tar ball, unziped and untared it and then run inside the Django directory (as root): # python setup.py install. Again, set path to MySQL and enable it through SMF. Note, that two versions of MySQL are actually installed -- version 5 is at /usr/mysql and version 4 is at /usr/sfw/bin.

Mac OS X

Python is available by default. I downloaded MySQL binaries as a dmg package and installed it together with MySQL.prefPane, which integrates in System Preferences and makes possible to start and stop the MySQL server easily. The installed path is /usr/local/mysql. For Django and MySQLdb installation I found an excellent article How to install Django with MySQL on Mac OS X, which I followed.

Test the Installation

To make sure that everything is installed you can try the following:

$ python
>>> import MySQLdb
>>> print MySQLdb.apilevel
2.0
>>>


Verify also that django-admin.py is in your path.

A new release of OpenSolaris is planned for end of November (version 2008.11). As it was already announced at the ug-czosug list, an all day event devoted to this OpenSolaris release is planned. An invitation to the event can be found at CZOSUG events page as usual.

The organizers, Martin Man and Roman Strobl (yes the Roumen ) set the event as an OpenSolaris 2008.11 training including hands-on labs, so bring your laptops and get ready for some work . OpenSolaris 2008.11 already generated some interest, check for example, this blog or this article.

There are currently two options you can choose from for building OpenSolaris (exactly the ON gate) -- OpenSolaris 2008.05 and Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE). As an experiment and learning exercise for myself I decided to start from a scratch and use both of these distributions to set up a build machine. The text below contains the main links I used to get the necessary information and also a lot of wisdom I got from Solaris RPE build masters in Prague -- Vlada Kotal and Vita Batrla.

Iso Images

In the time of writing this blog I used images based on b93 and b94 sources and closed binaries (closed-bins). Download links to both distributions can be found at Downloads web page (part of OpenSolaris web site). OpenSolaris 2008.05 can be also downloaded from opensolaris.com web.

SXCE: Link to SXCE leads to Sun's Downlad Center, which requires a simple registration. If you have already an SDN account you can use this one.

OpenSolaris 2008.05 OpenSolaris 2008.05 can be downloaded directly (no registration is needed) or via BitTorrent. Since the goal is to use the OpenSolaris 2008.05 for building OpenSolaris then the following has to be considered: OpenSolaris 2008.05 is based on Nevada (ON) build 86. OpenSolaris should not be built on a machine, which is more than 2 builds behind the current sources, so it is necessary to update the vanilla OpenSolaris 2008.05 to the most recent development builds. Another option is to download the latest iso image produced, which is based on build 93. The image can be downloaded via BitTorrent or directly from Blastwave mirrors in Santa Clara and Beijing.

OS Installation

I installed both SXCE and OpenSolaris 2008.05 in Parallels virtual machine. Note, that SXCE now also supports ZFS root, so I installed both systems as ZFS only.

Tools

The following tools are needed:

• Download and install Sun Studio 11 compilers and tools . Do not worry about the language selection (Chinese-Simplified). Again, a simple registration is required, your SDN account can be used.
• Download the latest ON developer tools (onbld) and install them.
• OpenSolaris 2008.05: Install Mercurial, Java compiler (SUNj6dev for 32 bit and SUNWj6dvx for 64 bit), and gcc packages (gcc will also install header files):
  $ pfexec pkg install SUNWmercurial
$ pfexec pkg install SUNWgcc
$ pfexec pkg install SUNWj6dev
• Set up you PATH, so output of
  echo $PATH | awk -F':' '{ for (i=1; i<=NF; i++)\
printf("%d\t%s\n", i, $i); }'
  will look like the following (thanks to Vlad for this tip):
1 /sbin
2 /usr/bin
3 /usr/sbin
4 /usr/ccs/bin
5 /opt/onbld/bin
6 /opt/onbld/bin/i386
7 /opt/SUNWspro/bin
8 /usr/sfw/bin
9 /usr/sfw/sbin

• Add /opt/SUNWspro/man and /opt/onbld/man to your MANPATH.

Prepare a Workspace

It is a good idea to create a separate ZFS file system for your workspace, for example:
# zfs create rpool/export/workspaces
# zfs set mountpoint="/export/workspaces"\
rpool/export/workspaces


Get the Sources

How to obtain ON sources and closed-bins is described at the ON/Nevada (ONNV) project web page.

• Switch to you directory for workspaces and get the ON sources from Mercurial repository:
  hg clone\
ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/onnv/onnv-gate
• Download the closed-bins:
  wget\
http://dlc.sun.com/osol/on/downloads/nightly-bins/\
on-closed-bins-latest.i386.tar.bz2
  and unpack them inside the onnv-gate directory
  bzcat on-closed-bins-latest.i386.tar.bz2 | tar xf -

Build the ON Gate

The following links provide the necessary information about building the ON gate:

• Instalation (from source) Quickstart
• Building OpenSolaris

Once you read through the links above you know where to get the opensolaris.sh script. Edit inside it the following variables:
GATE=onnv-gate
CODEMGR_WS="/export/workspaces/$GATE"
STAFFER=your_login

Now you are ready to run the build:
$ nohup nightly ./opensolaris.sh &
and monitor it:
tail -f onnv-gate/log/nightly.log | grep ===

OpenSolaris Developer Conference 2008 held in Prague finished exactly a week ago. This was a three days event organized by people from German Unix Users Group (GUUG) and Czech OpenSolaris Users Group (CZOSUG). I would like thank to everyone involved in this event -- sponsors (Sun, Intel, GUUG, and Commerzbank), speakers , attendees and organizers . A special thanks belongs to Academic and Medical Conference Agency (AMCA), which was behind of all the logistics and without their involvement we would not be able to run this event.

The conference brought together more than 60 people from around the world and the agenda was busy -- the speakers delivered four tutorials, two keynotes and twelve presentations.

Martin Man announced yesterday where to find slides, videos and pictures. Below are also several pictures from me -- both from the conference as well as from a social event on June 26th night (a boat ride on the Vltava river).

I do not know yet if and eventually when OSDevCon 2009 will be organized but if yes then I definitely would like to participate again.

I have an opportunity to use Asus Eee PC 4G Surf (the green one ) on which I managed to install OpenSolaris 2008.05 operating system. The installation went well, except a known bug with kb8042 driver. The workaround is quite easy, just start the kernel with -v parameter (the timing problem with initialization of the keyboard will go away). To make WiFi work I downloaded and installed a driver for Atheros WiFi card (an updated HAL is needed).

This machine is extremely cool because it's keyboard size is just about right for my fingers to be able to do some work while it is really lightweight (920 grams), so it is very convenient to carry it. Here are pictures of the Asus Eee PC running OpenSolaris and me using it at OSDevCon 2008 (thanks to Jim Grisanzio for taking this picture).

On May 28th I presented at CZOSUG meeting about OpenSolaris 2008.05 operating system, so my choice for a laptop to use for the presentation was quite obvious .

I recently installed OpenSolaris 2008.05 in VirtualBox 1.6.0 both on Mac OS X and also on my workstation running Nevada, build 88 (which would be equal to SXCE build 88 but this build was skipped).

Virtual Machine Settings

Base Memory	796 MB
Hard Disk	Normal, 16GB
Network	Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop, NAT

Notes

VirtualBox installation was very easy on both platforms as well as installation of the OpenSolaris in the virtual machine. However, I met a few problems:

• ICMP protocol is not supported by VirtualBox's NAT engine, so the initial network test using ping failed. This is actually well documented in VirtualBox's User Manual and other TCP/IP based protocols work fine.
• My workstation is on NIS, while VirtualBox's NAT relies on DNS. So, I had to create /etc/resolv.conf file with nameserver entry.

NAT is the only networking option for Mac OS X, while Host Interface (virtual NIC) option is available for other platforms including Solaris. I tried the procedure described in VirtualBox's User Manual (only the manual steps led to successful creation of the virtual network interface) but so far I was not successful in setting this up. VirtualBox did not start the virtual machine -- I got the following error: "Failed to open VNIC "vnic0" in raw mode.". So, I must be doing something wrong and I still need to investigate this problem.

VirtualBox offers also great and easy to use command line interface -- VBoxManage -- which is very convenient for controlling the machine.

References

Virtual Box Error – A Domain Name Server (DNS) for NAT networking could not be determined
Using Crossbow to get a host interface network for VirtualBox

Dirk Wetter from GUUG, one of the main organizers of OpenSolaris Developer Conference 2008 (OSDevCon 2008), announced that visitors registrations are now open! This is a great news, especially after long time of preparations for this event. Being one of the co-organizers (even not the most active one) provided me already with a lot of experience concerning "what does it mean to organize a community conference". Check the program and sign in !

Note, this entry was updated on November 24th, 2008. OpenSolaris 2008.11 RC2 was used for testing.

I recently tried several Release Candidates for the OpenSolaris (Indiana) release and as I learned more about installing and setting up the OpenSolaris in Parallels virtual machine I decided to consolidate my previous posts on this topic. I also plan to update this entry later if a new information appears.

System

I performed all my tests at following system configuration:

• MacBook Pro with Intel C2D processor 2.33 GHz, 2GB RAM, 120GB HDD
• Mac OS X, version 10.5.5
• Parallels Desktop for Mac, version 3.0

Virtual Machine

The virtual machine has the following basic parameters:

OS Type	Solaris
OS Version	Solaris 10
Main memory	1024 MB
Video memory	16 MB
1 x HDD, size	24576 MB
1 x CD/DVD ROM	Image file with OpenSolaris image
2 x Serial port	Emulation / Use output file
Network adapter	Bridged Ethernet / Default Adapter
Options/Booting	Boot Sequence is set to boot from CD-ROM at first

Installation

The installation itself went without any problems, I just followed the instructions displayed by the installer. When the system is rebooted after successful installation do not forget to change the Options/Booting/Boot Sequence to boot first from the hard disk.

Network Set Up

Parallels emulate Realtek 8029(AS) network adapter. A driver for this adapter can be found at vmtools.iso CD image located inside /Library/Parallels/Tools directory. Click on the CD icon at the bottom of window running the OpenSolaris virtual machine and connect this image.

The vmtools.iso gets automatically mounted and inside /media/PRTOOLS/Drivers/Network/RTL8029/SOLARIS directory is located device driver for the Realtek network adapter. Copy all the files to a local disk and run network.sh script ($ pfexec ./network.sh). Choose to get the IP address through DHCP. Once the script finishes then just reboot and the network should be up an running.

Native Resolution in Full Screen Mode

After the installation the default resolution is 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 is to change X settings to be able to use the native resolution in a full screen mode. Here are the required steps:

• Log as a root 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"
  • Restart X server (reboot).

References

• OpenSolaris / Indiana documentation
• Getting Solaris 10 working in Paralles by Martin MC Brown
• xorg.conf for virtual DragonFly on MacBook

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.