The Random Bit Bucket: Moinak Ghosh's Weblog

Linux For You one of India's premier Linux magazines has shipped Solaris Express Build 60 DVD on their current May issue. Joe George and myself were surprised on receiving a call from them at the last momment when they had already decided to ship Solaris Express and were trying out SXCR Build 59 for the last time before sending the image for mass replication.

They were having an Xorg issue which turned out to be an EDID probe failure due to a KVM switch. But there was another problem. We then went through a rush hour to burn and courier them a couple of DVDs of Build 60 which is a good stable build. Their office is in Delhi.

Ananth had to write an illustrated article on how to install SXCR. I spent a late night create an OpenSolaris goodies bundle that included all the opensource drivers, Nvidia driver, Compiz, Inetmenu, Gnome Themes and a variety of sundry other stuff. All one has to do is to extract the tarball and run ./install. Everything gets setup and the system reboots automatically. That is also included in the additional CD accompanying the issue. We wouldn't want new users having to hunt the net for OpenSolaris goodies after installing it esp. if their Ethernet card does not work!

The distribution of this mag is quite vast numbering tens of thousands and that many copies of OpenSolaris/SXCR went out. The only sad part: Build 60 has a bug where the GUI installer hangs after System Identification for any non-US locale. US locales work perfectly. This apparently is a Java bug. The workaround is to use the Text Mode Installer or select a US locale and change it later. We are trying to tackle the fallout using every means of communication: Blogs, Forum posts, mailing list notifications, subscribing to the LFY forum, Wiki page: http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Tweaking_Solaris etc.