Robs' Blog: incoherencies from an american ex-pat in exotic beijing,
  or: how i learned to stop worrying and love bureaucracy

• Web 2.0 is set for spending boom
• American walker goes round the world at 80 years
• California pays rising price for prison growth
• Jewish leader revives Shanghai synagogue

I use VNC on my system running xVM. Since a lot of other folks are doing the same, I thought I'd share my settings.

First off, I opted for the "VNC Enterprise Edition for UNIX" from RealVNC, which cost $US 50. I like the extra features that this edition (4.3.2) provides... see the web site for more information.

Here's my xstartup file:

#!/bin/sh

xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
xterm -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" &
/usr/local/bin/vncconfig&
gnome-session &

I'm running gnome, so that's why the gnome-session is in there. The vncconfig, however, is the really cool thing. With it, I'm able to copy-n-paste into and out of my vnc window onto my desktop... even if my domU is isolated from my dom0 whilst using IPsec.

When I start vncserver on my domU, I use:

vncserver -geometry 1500x900 -IdleTimeout 0

This stops those blasted disconnections due to idle time. The chosen geometry fits quite comfortably on one of the two 22-inch heads I run at home.

Oh, and I use the vnpasswd on both my dom0 and domU machines and set the passwords to be the same.

Finally, when I start the vnc viewer on my dom0, I use:

vncviewer snvdom1:2 -passwd ~/.vnc/passwd&

With the addition of the -passwd option, I'm able to start the viewer in the background.

First, a nod to other blogs that have been chronicling Solaris on an Eee PC:

• http://blogs.sun.com/duanst/entry/usd100_laptop
• http://blogs.sun.com/swede/entry/project_indiana_on_the_eeepc
• http://blogs.sun.com/timf/entry/x86_bioses_and_eee_pc

It was in large part due to conversations with Fiona and Tim that I decided to jump on the Eee PC bandwagon.

Like Tim, I started with an Eee PC 4G model (with 512 MBytes of memory). However, pretty much as soon as it arrived, I was off to ZhongGuanCun to purchase a 2 GByte memory upgrade, and, well, a 16 GByte SD HC card. With this new configuration, I also decided to install the (newly released) SXDE 1/08 software instead of the Project Indiana bits. And, well, take a look:

Yep, that's my little Eee PC driving a 46-inch Samsung LCD.

Now, some notes:

• The problem Tim reported here with Project Indiana bits didn't occur with SXDE.
• No tweaks were needed to get it going... specified the SD HC card as the install/boot device, and that was it.
• I'm running pre-release bits for WiFi. The current bits have problems with the integrated Atheros chip.
• The sound is a problem. Waiting on some upcoming OSS bits for that.
• The darn thing panicked (CR 6662425) when I tried to boot into xVM.
  In the meantime, I'm gonna try to get VirtualBox going... see Joe Bonasera's blog about it here.

All in all, I'm extremely pleased with this machine. And, well, for a total price of under $US 500, I think it it rocks. (I'll be bringing it to the February 28th meeting of the Beijing OpenSolaris User Group, hopefully with a couple other nifty things running. :)

My friend Shalon created his blog today, and his first entry is: A summary about creation of kinds of xen domU.

Shalon is a QE Engineer here in Beijing who is qualifying xVM. He has been instrumental in my efforts to become familiar with xVM, and how we might be able to utilize it in our testing and lab environments.

I have been, at times, a voracious reader. I devoured O'Neill, Poe, Shakespeare, Burns, Thoreau, Verne and Howard. (Yeah, you read it right... I *am* putting Conan the Barbarian right up there with Hamlet... and, if you don't like it, by Crom, come seek me out!)

I also used to read newspapers and periodicals often.

Then, well, something happened, and I stopped. I'm really not sure why. I mean, I'd read the Merc on the weekend (mostly for the Fry's ads), but that's been about it.

One of the very cool things about being in Beijing is that a lot of extremely smart people from Sun come to visit the site. Folks like John Gage, Greg Papadopoulos, Jim Hughes, and various other Veeps and high-level mucky-mucks.

John was absolutely amazing. He gave what appeared to be an impromptu talk in our main conference room, except that the web pages he listed were totally organized. It was truly fantastic watching him navigate through so much information effortlessly.

After his talk, I ask John what he read and for how long. He said that he spent between two and three hours a day reading... I also asked him what he read... with a focus towards online resources.

When Jim was here, I asked the same question of him.

Here's the start of a list... please feel free to add your own suggestions...

btw, as far as good books go, I'd have to vote for Amiram's recent suggestion to me of His Dark Materials. I read through the trilogy so fast a couple months ago, I now find myself yearning to read them again... just to pickup details that I surely missed.

As I've blogged about before, I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of the Firefox web browsing and Thunderbird email applications. I run them on my Solaris x86 box at work, and my Solaris x86 and MacBookPro systems at home.

And, just for the record, I actually removed the Safari packages from my MBP... it blows me away that Jobs would try to unbundle this POS. "The world's best browser" proclaims their download site... you've got to be kidding...

In any event, I check the addons for Firefox and the addons for Thunderbird on at least a weekly basis, and adjust my configuration at least every couple of weeks.

So, for folks who aren't as inclined to while away their time searching through such things, I figured I'd add a entry to my blog every now and then regarding something cool which I've found.

And, without any further adu. my pick for this post is:

Honestly, I've just not been happy with other tools I've used to monitor blogs and other pages with dynamic content.

When a page that you've tagged to monitor (right click, Scan Page For Updates...) is changed, an up arrow in the lower right hand corner of the browser's window changes to blue. Clicking on the arrow shows all the pages which you want to scan in a sidebar, with ones with changes highlighted.

Clicking on the below image shows you what happened when my friend Sin-Yaw just updated his blog.

So, there you have it... a really lightweight extension that is effective and easy to use... check it out. :)

So, since I'm writing this from the OpenSolaris/HCTLive table at the Sun Tech Days Beijing, I figured it'd be a good idea to show how *easy* it is to join the OpenSolaris community:

1. Goto the OpenSolaris web page, and click on the Register button.

2. Complete the form.

3. Look at the nice page thanking you for registering.

4. Click on the link in the email you will receive.

5. Look at the nifty confirmation page in your browser.

6. Start contributing. :)

7. And, visit opensolaris.org to download the new OpenSolaris Developer Preview, which was just released today!

I am leading a team looking into how we can make use of xen in our Solaris labs.

I've always been a firm believer of a "Sun on Sun" philosophy. That is, if Sun makes it, and we can use it, we should do so. I've thought this makes sense not only from a quality-control standpoint, but also from a cost perspective.

And, well, with xVM, our implementation of xen, this will definitely be the case.

This technology allows a system to have "guest" operating systems running on it, each with their own memory, disks, and even assigned CPU's. Picture functionality similar to vmware or Parallels... without the cost.

For example, I've got an Ultra 40M2 in my office with 8 Gbytes of memory and two 240 Gbyte SATA disk drives installed. On this setup, I'm running b76 (dom0), with four b76 guest domains (domU's):

Pretty damn cool!