If I could just get the stupid thing to build

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http://blogs.sun.com/mandy/date/20091029 Thursday October 29, 2009

Installing OpenSolaris packages from /contrib and /pending

The OpenSolaris /contrib package repository has a whole bunch of packages contributed by members of the OpenSolaris community or just by those who had a particular need for a certain package and who decided to submit it themselves.

You can install any of these packages either using the pkg command or via the package manager, you can even just go to the /contrib repository's catalog page and click on the 'install' link for the package(s) that you want to install.

To set up /contrib as a valid publisher for use with the package manager or the pkg command do the following as a user with the root role (or Software Installation profile):

pfexec pkg set-publisher -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib  contrib

Or you can add /contrib via the package manager through the File -> Manage Repositories pull down. If installing from the "install" link at http://pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib/en/catalog.shtml  the package manager will automatically add /contrib to the list of publishers.

To install packages using pkg, do the following:

pfexec pkg refresh
pfexec pkg install <package name>

You don't have to run 'pkg refresh' before installing every package, but it is probably best to do it reasonably regularly just to make sure that pkg has an up to date view of the repositories that it knows about.

There is also a /pending repository which is used to stage packages for testing while they are being made ready for promotion to /contrib. I wouldn't recommend arbitrarily using packages from /pending but you may want to provide feedback on a package, or as in the case with the ruby-mysql package, it maybe that the owner has suggested that you get it from /pending due to some issue getting it into /contrib.

To setup /pending as a publisher, you do much the same as you do for /contrib:

pfexec pkg set-publisher -O http://jucr.opensolaris.org/pending  pending

Or use the package manager File -> Manage Repositories menu.

To list the repositories that pkg knows about, run:

% pkg publisher 

PUBLISHER                             TYPE     STATUS   URI
opensolaris.org          (preferred)  origin   online   http://pkg.opensolaris.org/
contrib                               origin   online   http://pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib/
pending                               origin   online   http://jucr.opensolaris.org/pending/
mypkgs                                origin   online   http://localhost:80/
webstack                              origin   online   http://pkg.opensolaris.org/webstack/

If you have both /contrib and /pending added as publishers, when you install packages you'll need to qualify the package name with the name of the publisher from which you want to install it as follows:

pfexec pkg install pkg://pending/ruby-mysql

Which will install the 'ruby-mysql' package from the publisher name pending. Note that this is the publisher name, not the URI of the repository.

In the list of repositories above are a couple of other repositories that we've not talked about. The /webstack repository has packages that the WebStack team feel might be useful, but for which they are unable to offer support. This has packages for Web Tier applications such as Varnish and Nginx. We also sometime publish packages that are in the process of being integrated into OpenSolaris but are not yet available in the main repositories. The mypkgs repository is a repository local to our test system. It is very easy to set up a build environment for building your own packages from Spec files and then to publish them to a local repository. If you're going to do that though, you might as well publish them to /contrib via SourceJuicer.

Here's some other links that you might find useful:

Spec Files Extra is a project centered around the pkgbuild tool that builds Solaris SVR4 and/or IPS packages from spec files (and which is used by SourceJuicer)

The Genunix site has a page describing how to setup a SourceJuicer like environment

If you'd rather not get involved in submitting spec files to SourceJuicer but would like to see a package in OpenSolaris, drop us an email at sw-porters-discuss@opensolaris.org.

Posted at 11:26AM Oct 29, 2009 by MandyWaite in Open Source  |  Comments[0]

Ruby MySQL nearly in OpenSolaris

One of the big pain points when installing Native Ruby Gems is the need to have various build packages installed. Packages that deliver the likes of gcc, gmake and ginstall. You also need to know where the libraries and C header files that you want to build against are located. On OpenSolaris the last part should be a no-brainer at least with packages installed from the repository, but some packages such as MySQL don't install to /usr/lib and /usr/include and the mysql_config that the MySQL package ships is not on the default $PATH and even if it was, it emits Compiler and Linker information for Sun Studio, not for gcc.

What this means is that you have to install all of the tools above and then install the MySQL gem with options telling the build where to find the MySQL libs and the MySQL headers.

Making the MySQL gem available as an OpenSolaris package, means you don't have to worry about any of that. You just run:

pfexec pkg install ruby-mysql

and voila!, you have MySQL support in Ruby... But it doesn't work :o(

The ruby-mysql package was promoted to the /contrib repository this week. Unfortunately it was promoted before I had tested it fully (which shows we have some major holes in the processes used to get packages into /contrib). The version that's there currently is unusable as it causes a segmentation violation when running with Rails. If you want to use this package today then you can get it from the /pending repository. Details of how to make use of OpenSolaris repositories can be found on a separate blog entry here.

Posted at 10:49AM Oct 29, 2009 by MandyWaite in Ruby (on Rails)  |  Comments[0]

http://blogs.sun.com/mandy/date/20091028 Wednesday October 28, 2009

Nagios, Octave and SilverStripe in OpenSolaris

Several interesting packages were published to the OpenSolaris /contrib repository yesterday. They include Octave, SilverStripe and the 3 packages that make up Nagios. 

Nagios is a leading Open Source infrastructure monitoring tool that can monitor networks, hosts and even services, in fact it can monitor pretty much anything and it being Open Source it's fairly straightforward to add your own plugins. The main Nagios package is simply named nagios and delivers version 3.0.6 currently. In addition there is the nagios-plugins package which you'll install on systems that you want to monitor. A third package is nrpe (Nagios Remote Plugin Executor), which allows a centralised deployment of Nagios to execute and monitor plugins on other systems.

Octave is a GNU project, it's a high level language and runtime whose main use is for numerical computations. It's mainly command line driven, but can hook up with the likes of gnuplot in order to present graphs and other visual forms of mathematical data. I've tested it and it looks like it could be really useful for someone say, studying for a maths degree... like me for instance :o)

SilverStripe is a popular Open Source Content Management System, it's one of a number of such applications that OpenSolaris users have been clamouring for. Interestingly we did have some problems getting it to play nicely with MySQL 5.1 on OpenSolaris. When you are setting up the MySQL database prior to configuring SilverStripe modify the MySQL SMF service as follows:

svccfg -s mysql:version_51 setprop mysql/enable_64bit=true
svcadm refresh mysql:version_51
svcadm restart mysql:version_51

You'll either need to do this as root or as a user with the root role. These changes cause MySQL 5.1 to run in 64-bit mode.

You can install any of these packages either using the pkg command or via the package manager, you can even just go to the /contrib repository's catalog page and click on the 'install' link for the package(s) that you want to install.

To set up /contrib as a valid publisher for use with the package manager or the pkg command do the following as a user with the root role (or Software Installation profile):

pfexec pkg set-publisher -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib  contrib

Or you can add /contrib via the package manager through the File -> Manage Repositories pull down. If installing from the "install" link at http://pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib/en/catalog.shtml  the package manager will automatically add /contrib to the list of publishers.

To install packages using pkg, do the following:

pfexec pkg refresh
pfexec pkg install <package name>

These packages are great additions to the growing list of packages available via the /contrib repository. If you would like to contribute a package to /contrib visit the SourceJuicer page on OpenSolaris.org. If you'd rather not get involved in submitting spec files to SourceJuicer but would like to see a package in OpenSolaris, drop us an email at sw-porters-discuss@opensolaris.org.

Posted at 05:47PM Oct 28, 2009 by MandyWaite in Open Source  |  Comments[0]

http://blogs.sun.com/mandy/date/20091014 Wednesday October 14, 2009

Rake should be on the default PATH...

I can convince myself of anything. When we updated from RubyGems 0.9.4 to 1.3.5 I decided that it was ok for the 'rake' command to be in the $GEM_HOME/bin which then translated to /var/ruby/1.8/gem_home/bin. I justified it because users could run 'gem env', look at the "EXECUTABLE DIRECTORY" and see that they had to add /var/ruby/1.8/gem_home/bin to their $PATH env var. Having had to install and then run rake several times on different systems over the last few days I can see that this is wrong. I want to 'gem install rake' and then run 'rake <some rake task>' without the need to update my PATH. I'm certain that others will agree that this is how it should be.

I could easily change the way that we build RubyGems such that the "EXECUTABLE DIRECTORY" defaults to /usr/bin but I have no way of being certain that when the end user runs 'gem install <some gem with an executable>' that /usr/bin will actually be writable even by root (or the root role as used by pfexec). We have the Rails package in the /contrib repository that also delivers the Rake gem. This package installs the 'rake' executable to /usr/bin, but it's a bit much to ask you to install Rails just to get Rake. I seem to have the following options:

  1. With the SUNWruby18 package on OpenSolaris, provide wrapper scripts in /usr/bin for the popular gems that deliver executables. These would emit a message saying to install the require Gem should it not already be installed and run as normal if it is. This has a few corner cases that have to be considered
  2. Provide a /contrib package that provides wrapper scripts for popular gems which would work as described in (1)
  3. Change "EXECUTABLE DIRECTORY" to /usr/bin and modify RubyGems to detect the writability of /usr/bin. It does this by default but would end up installing any affected gems in root's ~/.gem directory.

I favour option 3, but only if it can be done without significant changes to RubyGems.


Posted at 01:19PM Oct 14, 2009 by MandyWaite in Open Source  |  Comments[2]