Back again

If you're wondering why it went quiet for so, my old Toshiba Tecra S1 finally died completely, the screen no longer works. As I had no laptop to play on there wasn't much to write about until now. The replacement is a Macbook Pro (I like the dual core 64 bit processor with 2g, plus the size & general quality of the construction.) Getting Solaris x86 to run on it was a bit of a challenge, but after following the instructions at:

http://good-for-nothing.org/page.php?17

I was able to get it going. At the moment wireless doesn't work (even though the Atheros chip is support) but the ethernet does so it's not a great drama and the screen is limited to 1024*800. This is early days though and I'm sure with the way hardware support is improving in Solaris x86 these limits will go.

Posted at 12:53PM May 16, 2007 by oz in Solaris X86  |  Comments[4]

Solaris 10/Sun Studio DVD Kits

Looks like free Solaris 10 Media Kits are available including a Solaris 10 6/06 DVD for SPARC and for x64/x86 as well as a Sun Studio 11 DVD with all of the latest and greatest tools and compilers, ie:

http://www.sun.com/solaris/freemedia

Posted at 10:51AM Nov 23, 2006 by oz in Solaris X86  |  Comments[1]

Firefox 2.0rc3 contributed builds now available on mozilla.org

Firefox 2.0rc3 contributed builds on Solaris10, Solaris 8/9 is now available on mozilla.org

Download Page and Location
==========================

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/2.0/releasenotes/#solarisbuilds http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/2.0rc3/contrib/

Posted at 05:10PM Oct 20, 2006 by oz in Solaris X86  | 

Oracle 10gR2 App Server for x86

And nother release from Oracle for Solaris x86, this time it's the Application Server. It's available through technet and can be downloaded from:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/ias/htdocs/101202.html

If this keeps up I'll need a larger hard disk for my laptop.

Posted at 09:28AM Sep 28, 2006 by oz in Solaris X86  | 

plugins for Firefox

How to install common plugins for Firefox[Read More]

Posted at 04:31PM May 23, 2006 by oz in Solaris X86  | 

Dtrace training

I was lucky enough to attend the "Dynamic Performance Tuning and Troubleshootingwith Dtrace" course last week http://au.sun.com/training/catalog/courses/SA-327-S10.xml being taught by Brendon Gregg www.brendangregg.com . If you get the chance to have Brendon present the course then you certainly get your money's worth as there are few people in the world who have as much practical experience with dtrace as Brendan. Looks like he'll be training in the UK soon http://www.context-switch.com/performance/dtrace.htm .

Posted at 04:29PM May 12, 2006 by oz in Solaris X86  | 

using zfs

Once I finally had ZFS available, the first test was to move my home partition from ufs to ZFS and see how hard it was.

umount /export/home

Then I had to comment out the entry in /etc/vfstab (ZFS checks to be sure there is no chance you will use a partition you shouldn't.)

zpool create -f p1 c0t0d0s1

zfs create p1/home

zfs set mountpoint=/export/home p1/home

Note, no entry is needed ni /etc/vfstab then, zfs tracks it all and takes care of it for you.

Well, that seems to be insanely easy (given that it's a logical volume, SVM+ufs would have been a lot more difficult.) Next step is to create a Sybase database and see how it behaves on ZFS.

Posted at 01:09PM Mar 01, 2006 by oz in Solaris X86  | 

upgrade via live upgrade

I wanted to start using zfs the other day, but that meant upgrading the os (I was running nevada build 25 at that point which didn't have zfs) wich was a problem as I was working from home and couldn't have my system down for a few hours to do the upgrade. No problem though, just time to use live upgrade to run the upgrade while I was still using it.

The first hiccup though is I didn't have a spare partition. As the system was mirrored though, I just did the old trick of breaking the root mirror and using the detached mirror as the upgrade environment and then reattaching the mirror after the upgrade. The steps went something like:

metadetach d20

lucreate -c solenv1 -m /:/dev/md/dsk/d20:ufs -n solenv2

lufslist -n solenv2

luupgrade -u -n solenv2 -s /cdrom/sol_11_sparc/s0
luupgrade -i -n solenv2 -s /cdrom/sol_11_sparc_2
luupgrade -i -n solenv2 -s /cdrom/sol_11_sparc_3
luupgrade -i -n solenv2 -s /cdrom/sol_11

luactivate solenv2

lustatus

ludelete solenv1

lucreate -m /:/dev/md/dsk/d0:ufs -n solenv3

luactivate solenv3

ludelete solenv2

metattach d0 d20

The only trick so to speak was the need to create and activate a third boot environment to be able to delete the enironment used to do the upgrade (so I could reattach it as the mirror again.) There is probably a better way of doing the last step, but that was the first thing that popped into my mind.

Posted at 12:44PM Feb 28, 2006 by oz in Solaris X86  | 

Mirroring root

I decided to mirror my hard disk the other day, to mirror the root partition one still has to use SVM currently, but it's pretty straight forward if you have used SVM previously.

Create the replicas (of the metadevice state database):

This step is needed to allocate some space for SVM to keep track of what's happening to all the devices. You actually need to make sure that more than half the replicas are available at any time, so for trouble free maintainance you should spread them over three disks (but I only did two as it's only a play system.) I got the space for the replicas by shrinking the swap partition by 30 meg and using that space to create another partition to hold them.

metadb -a -f -c 3 /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s3
metadb -a -c 3 /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s3

Create a one way mirror:

Even though your still using the partition, you can put a one way mirror over the top as the one way mirror won't write anything to the disk (unless you're silly enough to try and mount the one way mirror, just create it but don't do anything with it.)

metainit -f d10 1 1 c0t0d0s0
metainit d0 -m d10

Move the root partition to the one way mirror:

metaroot d0

And then reboot so that / is now mounted on the mirror. Create and attach the other side of the mirror:

metainit -f d20 1 1 c0t1d0s0
metattach d0 d20

At this point the root partition is now on /dev/md/desk/d1 and is mirrored onto physical drives /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 and /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0. Mirroring the root partition is almost the same mirroring any other partition, the only extra step is the metaroot command and the extra reboot.

Posted at 08:39AM Jan 20, 2006 by oz in Solaris X86  | 

Opera available for Solaris Intel

Now here is a piece of good news, Opera 9 is available for Solaris x86 as well. You can get the preview version from:

http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/9.0-Preview-1

It's great to see more and more Software becoming available for Solaris x86 these days, with the improved hardware support and wireless finally working, there is little reason left to use Windows these days (games and legacy software is about it.)

Posted at 10:29AM Oct 22, 2005 by oz in Solaris X86  |  Comments[0]

SOSUG

Well, the Sydney OpenSolaris User's group meeting went very well. First James did a very good presentation on ZFS which left me convinced that ZFS is a huge leap forward (of course that was my belief from before the meeting too, but the presentation was good :->)

Next Bryan showed us a number of new tricks and features he has implemented in Dtrace. If you ever get the chance to see Bryan, do so is all I can say. Bryan wrapped up his talk by pointing out some Easter Eggs I hadn't notice before, firstly that in abd you can do:

$ adb
$a
No algol 68 here

Evidently $a used to give you an Algol stack dump long ago so the message was added to stop people whining. When adb was replaced with mdb running in compatibility mode (which is what you really get when you run adb these days) they added evry feature & bug so hence it's still there. If you try it in mdb through you get:

$ mdb
> $a
No adb here

Bryan, should you read this though, I did pay attention (and throughly enjoy) the whole talk, not just the EE at the end :->

Posted at 11:21PM Oct 17, 2005 by oz in Solaris X86  |  Comments[0]

Nvidia's device driver

I installed the Nvidia device driver on my PC at home over the weekend (video card is a ge5700) which started first time once I added the /etc/driver_aliases entry. The first thing I noticed was a clear improvement of the responsiveness in the windowing system (yes even for the 2d side of things, I believe this has something to do with switching to dma which frees up the cpu for moving things along, not that the card itself is doing any magic.) Certainly worth trying out (you can find the drivers on http://www.nvidia.com.

Posted at 03:17PM Jul 24, 2005 by oz in Solaris X86  |  Comments[0]

Sydney Opensolaris User Group Meeting tonight

Tonight's the 2nd meeting for the Sydney OpenSolaris User Group. The first meeting was certainly worthwhile so I'd encourage anyone in the Sydney to come along. Their website is:

http://sosug.xolinc.com

and the meeting details are:

Annoucnement
------------

Wednesday, 6:00pm July 6th, SOSUG #2 !

* Where: iForce meeting rooms, ground floor, 33 Berry St, North Sydney.
* Speaker: Alan Hargreaves - OpenSolaris builds
* Speaker: Boyd Adamson - SMF
* plus general discussion on what has been happening.
* Afterwards: VC Bar for drinks and State of Origin
* Please arrive before 6:00pm - the building doors lock at 6pm.
* Be there or be square! (I've always wanted to say that) 

Unfortunately I can't make this one :-<.

Posted at 12:05PM Jul 05, 2005 by oz in Solaris X86  |  Comments[0]

printing in Solaris x86

For those who are wondering how to print in Solaris x86, I find the easiest is to simply use cups. Cups can be found on the Solaris software companion (see previous post on where to get it.) Then simply copy the startup scripts nito the correct directory, ie as root:

(cd /opt//sfw/cups/etc;tar cvf - .)|(cd /etc;tar xvf -)

The just run the startup script to start the daemon (to save a reboot):

/etc/init.d/cups start

Then go to your browser and go to http://localhost:631 and your at the admin page for cups. You add a printer there and from then on use the lpr/lp/lpstat commands in /opt/sfw/bin instead of the normal Solaris commands and printing will work as expected. Cups drivers for various printers can be normally found, just search via google.

Of course I use Cups simply because I'm used to it. The other way to print is simply goto the Launch bar in JDS, then Preferences -> Printer Preferences and you have a simple GUI to add a printer (far easier then in previous versions of Solaris.)

Posted at 06:35PM Feb 05, 2005 by oz in Solaris X86  |  Comments[2]

KDE

For those who prefer KDE (I'm a Gnome fan myself) you can run it easily on Solaris x86. Just install KDE from the Software Companion:

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/freeware/index.html

Then as root go to /opt/sfw/kde/dtlogin and run install-dtlogin. Next time you try to login you'll find that KDE is one of the session types you can choose.

Posted at 03:20PM Feb 04, 2005 by oz in Solaris X86  |  Comments[0]

Solaris 10 & Sybase

I installed Solaris 10 GA on my laptop last night, then restored my Sybase database and evrything ran flawlessly (of course!) The backup/restore etc was all no problem (Sybase version is 12.5.1.) So next to try will be Oracle 10G.

Posted at 01:36PM Feb 03, 2005 by oz in Solaris X86  |  Comments[1]