Monday May 23, 2005
How to Write Compelling Blog Posts ..... missing a crucial one
I saw this article "How to Write Compelling Blog Posts" during the weekend ... and I guess the only thing he missed is .... write an interesting post ... there are sooo many we can be without ... but of course, it's your discretion to decide which ones you like/read
( May 23 2005, 03:11:21 PM GMT+00:00 ) Permalink
distributions based on OpenSolaris
So ... here we are, we have all seen/used Solaris 10 for some time now or if you haven't then you may at least read some of the good pressarticles and reviews. OpenSolaris is also getting closer and closer to release the source code and if you've already finished looking through DTrace there will soon be plenty more to look at. But - What will you get ?
As we see it, the binary distribution of OpenSolaris is Solaris Express. You might say that that is not truly open source software (since Sun compiled it ?). OK, so you can obviously compile it yourself and as this is a new beginning for Solaris this will give you a kernel with some core functionality, it will not yet be the complete Solaris distribution but rather the ON (OS and Networking) consolidation a.k.a. kernel ... We are addressing this and the roadmap tells us it will require some more work before we have a complete distribution. Today OpenSolaris is more like kernel.org than Fedora from Redhat. Something my colluege Eric Boutilier has had some thoughts about too .... By the way, when choosing this path, there are plenty of help out there like blastwave, sunfreeware, solarpack etc to be used ....
Another thing, (which I tend to explain to people I have meet when discussing OpenSolaris) we can't open source the code more than once ..... e.g. Xorg, GNOME et. al. are already open source'd .... ok it doesn't stop us from including it but it's just a question of prioritizing the workload
Anyways, the other option is to go for a complete (non Sun) distribution based on OpenSolaris ... and there are already a few initiatives, like SchilliX. You may even want to use it on a PowerPC platform ... then look or help Cyril and the gang with Polaris ?
Maybe you are into optimize/customize and compile it for your specific system (like the gentoo bunch) then look no further, here is the announcement for gentoo/OpenSolaris support ... this will of course use Portaris.
So there will be options (and these are only the first ones) ... if you aren't happy running Solaris Express or Solaris 10
tag : opensolaris
( May 23 2005, 12:34:39 PM GMT+00:00 ) Permalink Comments [2]
Friday May 20, 2005
Riva calendar 2005
Yes finally, now it's on it's way, the Riva 2005 calendar ... a bit late but who cares, good things are timeless (and maybe priceless), or it's just for it's pictures .... tag: riva |  |
( May 20 2005, 11:41:08 PM GMT+00:00 ) Permalink
Wednesday May 18, 2005
Importing Mozilla profiles ....
I don't know if I am thick but I have never really seen/understood how you can get to re-use your mozilla settings once you have moved around (or reinstalled os etc, etc, etc) the mozilla directory (which holds all your settings and local email etc). This problem is equally bad on Windows as UNIX but because of the possibility of using the symbolic links in UNIX it makes it somewhat a lesser problem .... Windows though, is a pain .... and I really hate changing the settings again and again, it's not only typing in all the settings for mail servers, usernames, etc ... but then we have all the cookies and saved passwords  So yesterday I found out the "better way"(tm), pure coincidence, that you can just specify the directory path .... and then for the profile name you use the obscure directory name assigned by mozilla when creating a profile ... Voila ... (later you can rename the profile if you are in for the details Smoooth .... tag : mozilla |
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Monday May 16, 2005
| Riva, the most beautiful
boats in the world .... buildt by Carlo
Riva, the fourth generation of his family to build boats on the
shores of Lago d'Iseo in
northern Italy. But nobody is sure how many of the 4,000 (from the
1950's til the -90's) wooden boats built have survived
tag: riva |
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Sunday May 15, 2005
partition ids and dual/tripple/quad booting using grub .....
One of the things I do is to have alternatives ... I spend an awful lot of time using my laptop but also talking to customers and the like ... and as always the last thing I want to happen during a preso/demo is the system to "misbehave" but equally so I want to try out different stuff like trusted solaris, opensolaris or solaris express as much as possible .... The issues with this is that Solaris is only happy to see ONE fdisk partition of type 0x82 .... which means I can't have two Solaris partitions on that same disk ..... I could use the same partition and then have several Solaris slices in this fdisk partition but that kind of defeats the safetiness aspect when using "bleeding edge" e.t.c. stuff, although it has to be said that Solaris is very rarely giving me hard times ....
The other problem as you may already know, is that Solaris had the same partition type as Linux swap partitions (0x82). One way to get around this is to put your linux distro (root(?) and swap) partitions within a FAT16 Ext partition (0x05). This will then "hide" your linux environment from Solaris .....
But to handle both of these problems in the most effective way ... a niftier method (as I think) can be used. Firstly boot management should be done by GRUB and a particular command called parttype is your friend w.r.t. fdisk partition types .... parttype will let you change/flip partition types in the boot manager so that the OS'es will never see (i.e. you can hide) what's actually on the disk ....
This makes my /boot/grub/menu.lst look like :
parttype (hd0,2) 0x8
parttype (hd0,1) 0x82
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1
title Trusted Solaris 8 12/02 - Certified Version
parttype (hd0,1) 0x8
parttype (hd0,2) 0x82
rootnoverify (hd0,2)
makeactive
chainloader +1
title Gentoo
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda5
initrd /boot/initrd.img
the only requirement for now is that you also have to install GRUB a.k.a. a linux distro too ..
although this is something we will revisit in the future ...
tags:
This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer.
