Sometimes it is needed to run several instances of Mozilla (Firefox/Thunderbird) at the same time, using different profiles.

The MOZ_NO_REMOTE environment variable does the trick.

• start the profile manager:

  bash $ MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 firefox -ProfileManager
      

• start another instance using a particular profile:

  bash $ MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 firefox -P <profile name>
      

On Windows, the following script (.cmd or .bat) wraps firefox, allowing to start several instances of this application:

@set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
@start /D"c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox" firefox %*

The same thing is applicable to thunderbird as well.

I've been experiencing the following problem in Gnome desktop on the SunRay:

An error occurred while loading or saving configuration information.
Some of your configuration settings may not work properly.
    

Details tab shows:

Adding client to server's list failed,
CORBA error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0
    

Usually it happends 30 days after the user session startup.

Restart of the gconfd process did help:

$ ps -ef | grep gconfd
12428     1   0   Apr 12 pts/21     27:56 /usr/lib/gconfd-2 15
54658     1   0   Apr 13 ?          27:10 /usr/lib/gconfd-2 26

$ kill 12428 54658
    

After the kill(1) command, the desktop starts necessary gconfd processes on-demand, and applications continue to work.

The very first Open Solaris developer conference (www.guug.de/veranstaltungen/osdevcon2007) took place in Berlin Feb 27 - Mar 2 2007. I was really enjoy it, met lots of bright people from Germany itself, US, Ireland, India and even more.

I found that the interest to the "open" development in Germany is quite high. Well, I think that's because German people like clarity and 100% control over whatever they're using -- that's great and this makes "open" Unix systems very popular. As the result, "German Unix User Group" actually is quite large community, it includes contributors from the OpenSolaris and Linux worlds.

Here are the most interesting points, in my opinion, been presented on this conference. [Read More]

Live Upgrage feature in Solaris OS, refer to live_upgrade(5), no doubt, is extremely convinient way of doing not only an operating system upgrade, but also a single product installation or the other various experiments - all of these in a very very safe manner.

The basic idea is to maintain several operating system images - "boot environments" on a single machine at the same time. Besides, boot environments may share partitions. So, the current environment can be smartly cloned to the other spare partitions, then modified as it is required - starting with sevral files replacement, and ending with the whole OS level upgrade. After that, a newly created alternative environment can be used as a working one.

If something is screwed up, you can fall back to your previous stable boot environment any time.

Continuing with Live Upgrade, you may clone boot environment 1 to 2, upgrade 2, reboot into 2, thus 2 becomes your current environment, and so you may clone 2 back to 1, do upgrade, switch to 1 and so forth - i.e. you'll get a non-stop safe upgrade process. [Read More]

Setup of MS Windows Vista is pretty straight way forward, however several problems exist if you have couple of OS's already installed and you want to boot Vista as well as your Solaris OS from GRUB bootloader or do something like that. [Read More]

Native LDAP client configuration brings quite a few questions, especially regarding to SSL/TLS, so you can try to find answers in this blog [Read More]

Sometimes Gnome desktop in Solaris OS shows some fonts not properly,
particularly font in xterm(1) not looks corresponding to its definition in ~/.Xdefaults

XTerm*font: -dt-interface user-medium-r-normal-m*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

Actually, adding of

xset fp rehash

as a startup program to the session using gnome-session-properties(1) helps.

I was reading System Administration Guide: Security Services: Kerberos Service book, The Kerberos Network Authentication Service (V5) RFC and several web resources like Kerberos: The Network Authentication Protocol and Wikipedia: Kerberos protocol. Well, general docs are too general, specific ones too detailed, so couple of experiments are actually point out "How it works" and "How to configure it on Solaris OS" things, which may be useful for quick start with Kerberos [Read More]

A symptom of this problem is high and unreasonable system load. Sometimes such behaviour caused by a storm of interrupts from hardware termal monitor. If so, the following note describes how to track this and make an interim fix [Read More]

I was trying to switch OFF the bell, beep, or whatever the name of this odd thing is, on my laptop without speaker cut off.
There are some results [Read More]

Well, if you just need to boot or manually install x86 machine from network, and you find Network-Based Installations book not really covering a network boot process, and utilities like setup_install_server and add_install_client looks messy, doing too much and scary to you, then you can check the following info out.
Notes explains x86 machine boot process, how to configure TFTP and DHCP servers on Solaris OS for PXE use, how to work in GRUB [Read More]