Friday Feb 27, 2009

Solaris U6 on Dell Vostro 200

The USB detection is broken with ICH9 Use -B acpi-user-options=0x8 to boot.

Tuesday Feb 24, 2009

ZFS Delegated Administration

ZFS is one of the coolest features Solaris. In addition to having an unlimited snapshots automatically so that you can go back and recover deleted or modified files , the administration of this power can be delegated to the individual users. For example

# zfs allow rslee create,mount,snapshot rpool/export/home/rslee
$ zfs snapshot rpool/export/home/rslee@beforebigchange

Friday Feb 20, 2009

OpenSolaris 2009.06 107 Install

Tried a copy of OpenSolaris 2009.06 Build 107. For some reason, the graphical installer does not start by itself. The following is couple of steps to get the installer up:

login:jack
password:jack
su opensolaris
PATH=/usr/openwin/bin:$PATH
/usr/bin/dbus-uuidgen [--ensure=/var/lib/dbus/machine-id
gdm

Alternate way:

Work-around: Login as user "jack", password "jack" and then
issue the command

    $ svcadm clear nwam

The boot process should continue and start the graphical
desktop.

Once the system is up and running, use the development package tree as below:

pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev/ opensolaris.org.dev

Wednesday Feb 18, 2009

Lenovo x61 and OpenSolaris 2008.11

The following is list of things to make my laptop fully function with OpenSolaris 2008.11 so that I can finally remove Windows, for obvious reasons. I still need to maintain Windows within VirtualBox, which by the way boots up Windows faster than on native machine.

Additional Device Drivers/Software

Out of Box Functionality

The following items works without needing any tweaking:

  • Display brightness adjustment using the FN key
  • Keyboard LED light control using the FN key

Some tweaking required

  • To send display to external VGA screen
    xrandr --output VGA --auto
    

Booting OpenSolaris off USB Stick

Booting/Installing OpenSolaris 2008.11 from USB stick is described here Works very well. I followed just the first 3 steps.

wget http://genunix.org/distributions/indiana/osol-0811.usb 
pkg install SUNWdistro-const
usbcopy osol-0811.usb

If a prebuilt USB is not available, an ISO image can be converted to USB manually. This blog has instructions. The following is my example to convert Sun's xVM Server EA3 into USB stick

pfexec pkg install SUNWdistro-const
pfexec usbgen `pwd`/xVM-Server-full-i14_03.iso `pwd`/xVM-Server-full-i14_03.usb /tmp
pfexec usbcopy xVM-Server-full-i14_03.gen
Found the following USB devices:
0:	/dev/rdsk/c3t0d0p0	4.0 GB	USB      Flash Disk       5.00
1:	/dev/rdsk/c5t0d0p0	 HL-DT-ST	DVDRAM GSA-E50L  NE01
Enter the number of your choice: 0

WARNING: All data on your USB storage will be lost.
Are you sure you want to install to
USB Flash Disk 5.00, 4000 MB at /dev/rdsk/c3t0d0p0 ?  (y/n) y

Wednesday Jan 28, 2009

Mount NTFS partion on Solaris w/ ntfs-3g

Sometime, read/write into Windows NTFS partition on one's laptop. Solaris support was added into ntfs-3g package 1.2812 (August 15, 2008)

Reading and creating new files on a NTFS partition seems to work fine; however, I cannot overwrite a file. Waiting for bug fix. Will update the page when the NTFS overwrite works.

For compiling, please check this blog The following are my steps that consolidates some of the issues I had encountered:


download and install http://dlc.sun.com/osol/on/downloads/current/SUNWonbld.i386.tar.bz2

pkg install gcc-dev sunstudioexpress
pkg install SUNWgnome-common-devel


hg clone ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/fuse/libfuse
hg clone ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/fuse/fusefs
cd libfuse/
export PATH=/opt/onbld/bin:/opt/onbld/bin/i386:/opt/SunStudioExpress/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/sfw/bin

make
make install
make pkg

cd ../fusefs/kernel
make
make install
make pkg

pfexec /usr/sbin/pkgadd -d packages SUNWfusefs
$ pfexec /usr/sbin/pkgadd -d ../../libfuse/packages SUNWlibfuse


export PATH=/opt/SunStudioExpress/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/sfw/bin
wget http://ntfs-3g.org/ntfs-3g-1.2717.tgz
$ gtar xf ntfs-3g-1.2717.tgz
$ export CC=gcc
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ make
$ pfexec make install

For downloading pre-build package, please check this blog entry

These are packages created from the above procedure

Wednesday Jan 21, 2009

Install software from www.sunfreeware.com

Some of the applications have rather long list of dependencies that are not auto resolved. The following script takes all of the packages listed as the dependencies and installs the latest version if multiple versions are found.

The script does not do all of the work as dependencies listed for an application need to be screen scraped and put into a file. Still, it does make things easier.

The script uses the pkg-get from http://www.sunfreeware.com/pkg-get.html

Usage and Description:

In /tmp/pkglist, cut and paste of the packages required. /tmp/pkg-get-err.$$ may have multiple versions of software. take the last one and install it

Script:

for pkg in `cat /tmp/pkglist | sort -u`; do
  echo $pkg
  pkg-get install $pkg 2>/tmp/pkg-get-err.$$
  if [ ! -z `tail -1 /tmp/pkg-get-err.$$ | grep "pkg-get"` ]; then
    inst=`tail -1 /tmp/pkg-get-err.$$`
    `$inst`
  fi
  rm /tmp/pkg-get-err.$$
done
                    

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