Vijay Tatkar's Blog

OpenSolaris Apps of Steel Challenge
Heres an interesting programming challenge for budding hackers (just follow this link) .
OpenSolaris is looking to beef up its packages repository and you can help. Submit the best entry and win a laptop!
Have fun and make a difference in the OpenSolaris community, while you're doing it! Takers, you may want to act fast, the contest lasts until May 8th. And I should add: dont forget to use Sun Studio compilers to get that extra performance boost from all the improvements made for all hardware upto the most recent one.
Posted by tatkar ( Apr 17 2009, 09:15:04 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

xrandr is your(my) friend!
I have had considerable difficulty connecting laptops (particularly ATI-based) to projectors at various conferences (the most annoying ones are where the projector is connected through an intermediate switch that multiplexes inputs) in order to get twinviews on dual-displays. Cant tell you about how many hours I and some of my colleagues have spent configuring, tuning, hand-coding xorg.conf files(an extremely tedious task). This is all on Solaris/OpenSolaris, though in some cases, Linux and even Windows didnt do any better!
Over the past few months, we now have xrandr in OpenSolaris which detects and sets displays to specifications. The typically 1024x768 is still the best resolution I can get in most places, but thats not the utility's shortcoming; its just the nature of the equipment.
You can typically just type the command:

xrandr

to get a listing of connected devices and their possible resolutions. Then you can set the connection to the projector typically with a command like this:

xrandr --output VGA-0 --mode 1024x768

to get dual-display.
Yay, finally a solution that seems to work most of the time (there are still the odd times when I've found it doesnt get it right). The next trip to Sun TechDays in Hyderabad, India, would be a good test of this capability. I will be talking about Sun Studio compilers and tools again, this year. We have some new and cool features to talk about, so if you're in the area, drop in!
Posted by tatkar ( Feb 02 2009, 11:43:34 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Toshiba laptop to factory preinstall OpenSolaris
Sun and Toshiba announced today a factory-ready laptop running OpenSolaris.
At last, at long last! Its high time we got a popular laptop maker to pre-install (Open)Solaris (they will actually start shipping in 2009). Reading some of the comments on blogs and news stories, reaction seems to be more on the positive side. Maybe, now I can find an excuse to upgrade my laptop, though its technically in reasonable running condition!
Posted by tatkar ( Dec 16 2008, 10:58:30 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [3]

Installed OpenSolaris 2008.11 with Sun Studio Express 11/08
I just installed OpenSolaris 2008.11 (you can get it here, tho I got mine from an internal Sun DVD Test/Evaluation CD) on my x86 laptop in addition to another laptop that I use for shows (like Sun TechDays) and customer presos etc. To confess, my dual-boot laptop was still booting SXDE from Build 70 (its currently at 101 and the builds are biweekly, so I was about a year off :-)
The installation went smoothly. I didnt expect any issues since I know Acer Ferrari 4000 laptop has all the right characteristics and devices that OpenSolaris recognizes. Here are some of my observations that I would like to share here:

• The LiveCD install took 25 minutes (yes, I timed it). No issues (no partitioning required since I was reusing my older partition)
• Then I installed  other desirable packages, using the GUI Package Manager. This GUI now works better than it did in the previous OpenSolaris(2008.05) release. This took me another 25 minutes or so (that would depend on the speed of the internet connection for most folks, I suspect). I installed the following packages:
• amp-dev
• ss-dev
• netbeans
• gcc-dev
• hpc-dev
• webstackui
• openoffice

I now have everything I need: OpenOffice, Developer Tools (Sun Studio, NetBeans and GNU toolchain), AMP/Web tools, HPC tools (Clustertools). Went without a hitch and I'm happier now with the new look-and-feel and overall functionality. I also have the WR breaking Sun Studio Express 11/08 installed.  Later, I hope to blog about features as I try them out.
I've heard some good things about the new ZFS Time Slider; thats the first one to check out.

Posted by tatkar ( Dec 12 2008, 12:46:43 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Cool! OpenSolaris on a USB Bootable drive
BeleniX, a distro of OpenSolaris, can now boot from a USB thumb drive. A simple USB installer script is available that can dump the LiveCD contents to a USB thumb drive and make it bootable.
Read about it here at the Belenix site.
BeleniX is an OpenSolaris distribution which is currently a LiveCD (runs directly off the CD). It includes all the features of OpenSolaris and adds a whole variety of opensource packages. It can be installed to harddisk as well.BeleniX is free to use modify and distribute.
You can watch the YouTube Video here.
BeleniX is one of several OpenSolaris Distros. The others are:

• Solaris Express
• BeleniX
• Nexenta
• SchilliX
• MarTux

This particular addition was made by an enthusiast, Anil Gulecha , who's an engineering student in Bangalore, who picked up OpenSolaris on his own and has started making additions to it. Go Anil! Go OpenSolaris!

Posted by tatkar ( Dec 08 2006, 12:56:00 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Solaris 10 and Sun Studio 11 DVD Kits now available for FREE!
The Free Solaris/SunStudio Media kit is now posted at http://www.sun.com/solaris/freemedia/
The kit includes Solaris 10 6/06 (aka Update1 release) for both SPARC and x86 and contains the Sun Studio 11 Compilers and tools.
Dont wait to download, just sign up and have Sun send the DVD to you directly. Encourage your customers to do the same!

Posted by tatkar ( Nov 22 2006, 10:56:01 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [2]

Google: Wont you have a Free SunStudio with that OpenSolaris?
You have probably heard about this by now: Google testing Sun's OpenSolaris . Its wonderful that it may be looking to replace Linux in its data center (same article).
Yay! Heads are clearly turning (Open)Solaris's way; its one more sign of momentum swinging towards Sun.
If anyone has an insider track on who in Google is involved with this, I'd like to know from this person whether they would consider going with SunStudio along with Solaris. Please come talk to us(me) and I will be happy to see how we can help Google.
Posted by tatkar ( Sep 21 2006, 02:00:22 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

SunStudio 11 Patchlevel compilers for OpenSolaris development
You can now grab the latest SunStudio 11 compilers with the required patch levels that have been tested for OpenSolaris ON builds. OpenSolaris is now advocating these compilers instead of SunStudio 10.
http://javashoplm.sun.com/ECom/docs/Welcome.jsp?StoreId=8&PartDetailId=SS11-OSOL-SEP06-SF-G-F&TransactionId=try
To verify that you are using the correct compiler, fbe -V should report:
120759-08 for x86
and 120760-09 for sparc
Go on:

Posted by tatkar ( Sep 05 2006, 10:41:57 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

OpenSolaris has now switched to SunStudio 11
Just saw this email from the OpenSolaris folks; the conversion from Sun Studio 10 to 11 has been in the works for a while now and now its completed!
Sun Studio 11 software is available for the OpenSolaris Community
Sun Studio 11 software can now be used by the OpenSolaris Community, as the ON Consolidation, now builds with Sun Studio 11.
It can be downloaded from the Tools community at: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/tools/sun_studio_tools/sun_studio_11_tools/
note: This is a tarball image of Studio 11 with all the necessary patches already incorporated for ON builds.
I should add that we compile several other applications during every build cycle (current list is around 140 or so and counting various version numbers, its around 400). I have asked for this list to be published around the time we release Sun Studio Express 2 binaries. Yes, we eat our own dogfood at Sun and getting our various C/C++/Fortran offerings compiled to take advantage of the latest compilers is a major initiative.
Posted by tatkar ( Aug 02 2006, 04:23:44 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]