Brian wrote up a blog entry a while back on configuring an NVidia graphics chipset to use an external monitor while running OpenSolaris. Earlier today Charlie Hunt posted a nice entry on doing the same with an ATI chipset.

If you try to install two instances of Solaris/OpenSolaris on one machine, you'll get into trouble - the installer will want to install into the first primary Solaris partition on the disk. Clearly the installer doesn't support having multiple instances of Solaris/OpenSolaris on one computer. I learned recently a neat trick which can overcome the limitations of the installers. This way I can install both Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris on my machine in dualboot.

The trick is to install Solaris/OpenSolaris and after installation change the type of the partition where the OS got installed to something else (e.g. FAT32 or NTFS). Fdisk can do the job nicely or you can use other favorite partitioning tool to change the partition type. During second installation you will be able to create a new primary Solaris partition after the first partition and the installer will install without any issues because it won't be aware of the second instance of Solaris/OpenSolaris.

After the installation you can switch the first Solaris partition type back to Solaris and update your GRUB's menu.lst file and you have now a working dual boot with two instances of Solaris/OpenSolaris.

One of the cooler parts of my job is getting to visit universities around the world. Last week brought us to São Paulo, Brazil for TechDays. On Thursday, Roman Strobl, Vijay Tatkar and I headed over to the Integrated Systems Technological Laboratory at the University of São Paulo to talk about OpenSolaris. There we were greeted by Professor Marcelo Knörich Zuffo and Marcia Kondo, Virtual Reality Manager - how's that for a job title?

The day began with a tour of their Digital Cave:

Our first trip was a hang gliding tour of Rio de Janeiro, followed by a walking tour of historic São Paulo back in 1911. Here's a blurry picture of Roman in the CAVE:

Once we stepped back into reality, Professor Zuffo gave us a tour of the media engineering lab, and the Digital TV project that they're developing. As you can imagine, most of Brazil still receives their TV signal over the air, and Professor Zuffo's team is developing a low cost set-top box that will bring the digital TV experience to the masses:

On the way to the media lab, Professor Zuffo pointed out the solar powered wireless devices they're running throughout the campus:

The device can transmit up to 10 days without sunshine. A truly free Internet.

Finally, Roman, Vijay and I got to present OpenSolaris. The students in the Virtual Reality lab are most familiar with Linux, so it was fun to show them features like ZFS, DTrace and SMF.

A big thanks to Marcelo Vitor Moretti Arbore, Sun's Campus ambassador at the Integrated Systems Technological Laboratory at the University of São Paulo for setting up the meeting.

Sun Tech Days Sao Paulo was crowded with folks who wanted to know more about Java, MySQL, OpenSolaris, and several other technologies.  We had pretty good attendance at the OpenSolaris sessions and traffic at the booth was heavy during the breaks.  A few photos below.

I seem to have a knack for getting involved with Software Freedom Day (SFD) events that are not actually held on Software Freedom Day itself.  The day before SFD I was at an event in my hometown of Austin, TX.  One week after SFD I did a presentation at a celebration that was held in the beautiful city of Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil. The event was organized by the local OpenSolaris Users Group.

As Vitório Sassi explains in this blog entry, the event was scheduled for September 27 to accommodate a local holiday.  You can see the agenda here; it is mostly in Portuguese but it is easy to spot the variety of open source technologies that were discussed: OpenSolaris, Java, Seam, Spring, PostgreSQL, Debian, Pentaho, etc.

In addition to the photos from the event, I have a few pictures of the scenery here in Porto Alegre, including a group of black cats that crossed my path during a stroll near the hotel.  Bruno Souza said that "a black cat crossing your path is supposed to be good luck, right?"  That's not what I was taught, but perhaps it is correct here in Brazil, because today's event was a big success.  :-)

The Connecticut OpenSolaris User Group launched in style last night at The Hartford Club, probably one of the more swanky places to host an OSUG. This is the same club to which Mark Twain belonged. Check out its Famous Guests list.

As expected most of the big insurance companies were in attendance, including The Hartford and Travelers.

Isaac Rozenfeld, who came up from New York, led off appropriately with an introduction to OpenSolaris, covering the project, the community and the distribution.

The real treat for this group (no offense to you Isaac), was that George Wilson, one of the ZFS engineers, was in town from California to do some work with CIGNA, and the local team wisely roped him into presenting to the user group. George gave a version of ZFS - The Last Word in File Systems. It was fantastic to hear the presentation from someone who knows ZFS like the back of his hand (which you can clearly see in the picture below).

When the event wrapped up, and I'm not making this up, the group retired to the smoking lounge for drinks and cigars. I regret not getting a picture of the group sitting around the lounge smoking cigars, with one member playing music on the grand piano while trophy buck heads looked down on them from the walls above.

Overall, it was a great opportunity for me to meet a bunch of local folks interested in OpenSolaris, both inside and outside of Sun. There are already plans for next month's meeting, so if you're in the Connecticut or Western Massachusetts area, join the mailing list to keep informed.

Finally, a big thanks to F3 Technology Partners for hosting the event with so much style.

One of the first Observatory blog entries that Roman wrote was called Having NWAM under control. It is the only Observatory blog entry that I have printed out so that I can carry it in my laptop bag.  I can always refer to blog entries here and elsewhere online, but only if I can first get NWAM to connect.  :-)

I recently found another document that is worth printing out in order to have it available if networking problems strike: Troubleshooting Network Problems, which describes how to detect and resolve common problems when using NWAM.

I told Roman about it and he was particularly happy to hear that the document includes information on how turn on NWAM debug logging. 

I recently got a comment on a blog entry I did a while back that explains setting up a multiboot system. The comment was from Peter Jones and he was having trouble editing the menu.lst file.  He had apparently overlooked the exact syntax that I had specified:

pfexec gedit /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst

From the content of the comment, it appears the problem was that he did not specify pfexec, so he was unable to save changes to the file. 

That got me to thinking about how frequently in these blog entries we use pfexec, and we have never posted a detailed explanation of what it does and why it works. So I made a note to write a blog entry on that topic. 

I was about to write it up when I noticed that Joerg Moellenkamp has recently published a blog entry that pretty much says exactly what I was going to write; check it out at Less known Solaris features: pfexec. In particular, make note of the part at the end where he describes how by default, the userid you create during installation of OpenSolaris 2008.05 has the all-powerful Primary Administrator rights profile assigned to it.

Software Freedom Day is officially on September 20.  But here in Texas, we don't always follow the rules.  :-)

Will St. Clair organized a celebration on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin on September 19.  The nice folks in Sun's Campus Ambassador program provided the swag, which was very popular (along with the cookies that they bought).  The CDs of NetBeans 6.1 and OpenSolaris 2008.05 moved the fastest, followed by the canvas shoulder bags (Will is modeling a bag in one of the photos).

I tagged along in order to talk to folks about OpenSolaris, NetBeans, and open source in general.  We had a good crowd - Stephanie Peco of the Electrical & Computer Engineering department was kind enough to set us up with a prime location.  Taking inspiration from Jim Grisanzio, I have assembled some photos from the event:

Tim Cramer, director of OpenSolaris engineering at Sun, is running a townhall meeting today (Tuesday, Sept 16th, from 3-5pm US pacific time). The plans for the upcoming 2008.11 release will be discussed as well as many community projects will be highlighted in the form of lightning talks. More details available in this e-mail. Too bad the time of the call is not Europe-friendly (it starts at midnight in my timezone) but the good news is that the call will be recorded. 

Updating OpenSolaris should be straightforward. The documentation says that you need just to run following command:

$ pfexec pkg image-update

This way you'll get updated to latest bi-weekly bits (currently at build 97). If updates worked as advertised, it would be perfect, however I got burned several times during updates, so I would like to warn you before you waste your time with unsuccessful updates.

At first, read the release notes. Pay very special attention to the IPS instructions. These commands should be executed before you install any packages or perform updates:

    $ pfexec pkg refresh
    $ pfexec pkg install SUNWipkg@0.5.11-0.86
    $ pfexec pkg install entire@0.5.11-0.86
    $ pfexec pkg install SUNWipkg-gui

Why is this important? The version of IPS distributed with 2008.05 had several major bugs. I don't want to go much into details about these bugs, all you need to know is that they are really ugly and can even cause your system to become unbootable. So run these updates.

Second, before running the pkg image-update command read the update notes. Again, these are very important and if you try to run the update directly from 2008.05 install your system may become unbootable (luckily the old boot environment will still exist but you won't be able to boot into the new boot environment, so you waste a lot of time - these updates are not exactly small).

It is NOT possible to update your system using the Package Manager GUI so you need to use the command line to do the big update.

Finally, a word of warning. I updated my system several times. Many other bloggers reported successful updates to latest builds. I guess they don't use that much of the software, because there have been many issues in recent builds - e.g. the package manager wouldn't start, Firefox wouldn't start, linker wouldn't link, etc. At the end I decided to stick to build 86 (the original OpenSolaris 2008.05 install) because I couldn't get my system ready for a presentation - there was always something not working.

Perhaps all these issues have been resolved in recent builds - I certainly hope so (and yes, I did report some bugs related to updates). If you are just a regular user of OpenSolaris and you do not want to spend your time with troubleshooting some of the issues that may happen after update, my suggestion to you is NOT to update. Wait for the next release (coming soon - in November). On the other hand if you want to help the OpenSolaris project and have some time available to test latest builds and report bugs, you'll want to run the latest bits.

We certainly want as many people as possible trying the latest updates, but from what I saw in other blogs it looked like everyone should update to latest bits. I recommend to think twice before doing so, you might get burned. I think upgrading just to the next major release is fine for regular users of OpenSolaris and even though running "pkg image-update" looks simple enough things can go wrong. You have been warned :)

At OSCON back in July the Sun Web Stack was unveiled. The Sun Web Stack contains all the popular tools needed to develop and run a web application, all pre-configured to work together. Specifically, the stack includes the following components:

• Apache
• MySQL
• PHP
• Python
  
• Tomcat
  
• Subversion
• cvs
• Squid
• memcached
• NetBeans
  
• WebStack Tools and UI 

The stack is available as IPS package amp-dev:

bleonard@opensolaris:~$ pkg info -r amp-dev
          Name: amp-dev
       Summary: AMP Development cluster
         State: Not installed
     Authority: opensolaris.org (preferred)
       Version: 0.5.11
 Build Release: 5.11
        Branch: 0.86
Packaging Date: Thu Aug 21 18:24:48 2008
          Size: 0 B
          FMRI: pkg:/amp-dev@0.5.11,5.11-0.86:20080821T182448Z

Note, the amp-dev package is large, 627 MB, so plan to give it several minutes to download and install. However, if you already have some of the packages installed, IPS will reconginze that and not download and install them again.

So to install it:

bleonard@opensolaris:~$ pfexec pkg install amp-dev
DOWNLOAD                                    PKGS       FILES     XFER (MB)
Completed                                  50/50 19765/19765 618.03/618.03 

PHASE                                        ACTIONS
Update Phase                                     2/2 
Install Phase                            22409/22409 
PHASE                                          ITEMS
Reading Existing Index                           8/8 
Indexing Packages                              50/50 

After installation there will be an option under the developer tools menu to Initialize the web stack:

The initialization process will open a terminal where you'll need to enter your root password:

http://blogs.sun.com/observatory/resource/200809_sun_web_stack/Screenshot-Terminal.png

And the the initialization will complete:

After which the menu for the web stack GUI tool will be available to you:

However, before you can start the Apache and MySQL servers, their SMF services need to be initialized. You can accomplish this by restarting the SMF manifest import service as follows:

svcadm restart manifest-import 

Give the manifest-import service a couple of seconds to load the new service descriptions as it restarts. When complete, you can properly query the services:

bleonard@opensolaris:~$ svcs -l apache22
fmri         svc:/network/http:apache22
name         Apache 2.2 HTTP server
enabled      false
state        disabled
next_state   none
state_time   Fri Sep 12 18:39:33 2008
restarter    svc:/system/svc/restarter:default
dependency   require_all/error svc:/milestone/network:default (online)
dependency   require_all/none svc:/system/filesystem/local:default (online)
dependency   optional_all/error svc:/system/filesystem/autofs:default (online)

bleonard@opensolaris:~$ svcs -l mysql
fmri         svc:/application/database/mysql:version_50
name         MySQL RDBMS
enabled      false
state        disabled
next_state   none
state_time   Fri Sep 12 18:39:32 2008
restarter    svc:/system/svc/restarter:default
dependency   require_all/none svc:/milestone/network:default (online)
dependency   require_all/none svc:/system/filesystem/local:default (online)

And then successfully start them using either the Start Apache2/MySQL Servers menu, or the Web Stack Options dialog:

And you should be all set. You can quickly test your setup using the sample applications that ship with the web stack.

For more information, including the details of all the installed packages, see Setting Up Your AMP Development Environment. You can also track the Web Stack project at OpenSolaris.org.

Mike Gerdts has a nice blog entry on how to Boot OpenSolaris into Single User Mode.  Unfortunately, it appears that his image links are broken, so the screen snapshots that he refers to in the text are not visible (at least, not when using Firefox 2 on OpenSolaris 2008.05).

So I have taken his instructions, made a few edits, and provided screen snapshots of my own.

When you first start the machine, you will see a GRUB menu.  The exact contents will vary, but there should be at least one entry for OpenSolaris.  As an example, this is from one of my machines:

With the entry for OpenSolaris highlighted, press the 'e' key and that should take you to:

In the example shown above, I used the down-arrow key on the keyboard to highlight the second line, since that is the one I want to edit.  I press the 'e' key again to edit that line, which takes me to:

Add -s to the end of that line: 

And then press the Enter key to go back to the list of commands:

Press the 'b' key and the system will begin to boot. You will eventually be prompted for the root password:

After you put in the root password, a shell prompt will be displayed and you're ready to do whatever system administration is needed that requires single user mode. 

When you no longer need single user mode, you can have the boot process pick up where it left off.  As the documentation points out, all you have to do is press Ctrl-D.  

I used the blog entry Brian wrote to get Songbird up and running.  There are, however, additional multimedia options for OpenSolaris.  On a forum thread over on OpenSolaris.com, Calum Benson pointed out that Real Player is available.

I tried it out - it is an older version, but it works great so far.  There is a .pkg available for download, but I just used the .tar ball version.  I copied realplay_bin_s10_i386.tar.gz into a new directory and then used:

$ gunzip realplay_bin_s10_i386.tar.gz
$ tar -xvf realplay_bin_s10_i386.tar

There is a shell script included called realplay, so it is easy enough to create a shortcut on the menu to start it:

On a different forum thread on OpenSolaris.com, I found out about the availability of a VLC player for OpenSolaris.  It is in an IPS repository; the instructions are in the thread, but I have repeated them here:

$ pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.lifewithsolaris.jp:10000 lifewithsolaris.jp
$ pfexec pkg refresh --full
$ pfexec pkg install -v LWSvlc

The end result was a new menu entry: Applications > Sound & Video > VLC media player.  Now I can watch the trailer for the upcoming Vin Diesel movie: Fast and Furious.

Solaris is best known as a data center operating system. So what makes it so great for you, the developer? That question is addressed by Hugo Rivero and Marty Duey in this new web cast, OpenSolaris:Your Boundless Development Platform. They do a nice job of comparing side-by-side Solaris to OpenSolaris. I especially like the comparisons of the installation media requirements and the installer differences. If you have 25 minutes it's worth the watch.