OpenSolaris2008.11 PreInstalled on Dell hardware.

I got the idea to get the ball rolling now its your turn as the community to make your vote count here;
OpenSolaris2008.11_PreInstalled.

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Boycott Foxconn ! ~ A worth while read ~

This is one of the great reason why people buy hardware not just from Sun but from Tyan and others..

A very worth while read indeed; here.
You can Digg it, here.
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A great reply to a Broadcom chipset user.

This was a fantastic reply to a Broadcom chipset user complaining about kernel panics on his old laptop!

"Hi,

Can't you just buy a better mini pci wifi card that is properly supported ?
Avoid using ndiswrapper, it will course kernel panic such as what your getting..

Regards,
Edward."

The user then goes on to complain about not wanting to spend any money on the laptop.

Which James came out with a perfect reply which I will probley have to reuse in the future;

"Apparently you fail to understand that Broadcom cards are not supported
by Broadcom due to internal policy and frivolous control restraints they
feel they need to put on everyone. It's not any system's fault for not
supporting Broadcom, they will not provide documentation for developers
to write anything decent, so is it any coincidence that it causes
systems to crash? Employing an interpreter for Windows drivers due to
Broadcom's deaf ears is a stop-gap measure but hardly qualifies as the
way to ensure yourself a good experience with a system as you've said
have not used until now. Such a small investment will save your hours of
problems with the OS, plus the bonus that you save time from not fixing
Windows problems, like the mundane and time consuming defragmentation
due to bad file system design or cleanup of redundant files, registry
garbage or update backups.

Do yourself a favor it's $10-15 (Nothing considering the devalued US
dollar), get an Atheros or Intel wireless card off eBay, there's quite a
few supported by OpenSolaris. There's a list under the laptop community
for wireless cards and their respective chip set, as Atheros and Intel,
like NVIDIA are merely the ones that write the specification, not the
fabricators. (At least not to consumers typically) They work with
Windows (Obviously) but as an added bonus if OpenSolaris doesn't work
out for you, you have a card that'll work well with the other
alternatives too! (FreeBSD and Linux) "

The moral of this story is, Don't wast your time/days over something that cost 15$ and is usually better hardware in any case.

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New Indiana/OpenSolaris spin - snv93.

Torrent file:
http://dlc.sun.com/torrents/info/osol-0811-93-global.iso.torrent
All Languages, LZMA compression, 652 MB - Fits on a 700MB CD.
MD5 check sum ; (osol-0811-93-global.iso) = d9138221bb7b7306c7b7356d0c578c51

Forum post:
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=258248#258248

Regards,

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Songbird 0.6 on OpenSolaris

edward@opensolaris0805:~$ pwd
/export/home/edward
edward@opensolaris0805:~$ wget http://releases.mozilla.com/sun/Songbird-Solaris/releases/0.6/pkgadd/songbird-0.6.en-US.opensolaris-i386-pkg.bz2
--15:26:32--  http://releases.mozilla.com/sun/Songbird-Solaris/releases/0.6/pkgadd/songbird-0.6.en-US.opensolaris-i386-pkg.bz2
          => `songbird-0.6.en-US.opensolaris-i386-pkg.bz2'
Resolving releases.mozilla.com... 63.245.208.158
Connecting to releases.mozilla.com|63.245.208.158|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 20,959,081 (20M) [application/x-bzip2]

100%[====================================>] 20,959,081   387.74K/s    ETA 00:00

15:27:27 (381.30 KB/s) - `songbird-0.6.en-US.opensolaris-i386-pkg.bz2' saved [20959081/20959081]

edward@opensolaris0805:~$ bunzip2 songbird-0.6.en-US.opensolaris-i386-pkg.bz2
edward@opensolaris0805:~$ pfexec pkgadd -d songbird-0.6.en-US.opensolaris-i386-pkg

The following packages are available:
 1  SFEsongbird     The desktop media player mashed-up with the Web.
                    (i386) 0.6,REV=110.0.4.2008.06.18.19.04

Select package(s) you wish to process (or 'all' to process
all packages). (default: all) [?,??,q]: 

Processing package instance  from 

The desktop media player mashed-up with the Web.(i386) 0.6,REV=110.0.4.2008.06.18.19.04

This appears to be an attempt to install the same architecture and
version of a package which is already installed.  This installation
will attempt to overwrite this package.

This is an open source package.
Use and redistribution subject to license terms as described in the
documents included in the sources.
Using  as the package base directory.
## Processing package information.
## Processing system information.
  553 package pathnames are already properly installed.
## Verifying package dependencies.
## Verifying disk space requirements.
## Checking for conflicts with packages already installed.
## Checking for setuid/setgid programs.

Installing The desktop media player mashed-up with the Web. as 

## Installing part 1 of 1.
[ verifying class  ]

Installation of  was successful.
edward@opensolaris0805:~$ uname -v
snv_91
edward@opensolaris0805:~$

CIFS share with real-time virus scanning in OpenSolaris.

I had a question the other day about NAS and I reply with OpenSolaris.
So I thought it would be a good idea to document the whole process here..
As always see docs.sun.com for proper documentation on the subject, here:
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/820-2429

I will be setting up the share in 'Workgroup' mode.

First we need to add in the missing bits:
$pfexec pkg install SUNWsmbs
$pfexec pkg install SUNWsmbskr
$pfexec pkg install SUNWvscankr
$pfexec pkg install SUNWvscanr
$pfexec pkg install SUNWvscanu

Next, start up the service:
$pfexec svcadm enable -r smb/server

..And of course join a workgroup:
$smbadm join -w workgroup-name

N.B. CIFS does not support UNIX or NIS style passwords. The SMB PAM module is required to generate CIFS style passwords. When the SMB PAM module is installed, the passwd command generates additional encrypted versions of each password that are suitable for use with CIFS.

Add the following line to the end of the /etc/pam.conf file to support creation of an encrypted version of the user's password for CIFS.

$pfexec echo "other password required pam_smb_passwd.so.1 nowarn" >> /etc/pam.conf

Note - After the PAM module is installed, the passwd command automatically generates CIFS-suitable passwords for new users. You must also run the passwd command to generate CIFS-style passwords for existing users.

$pfexec passwd username

Now the ZFS part; to enable a share on a ZFS FS then its simply:

$pfexec zfs set sharesmb=on fsname

Turn RT-AntiVirus scanning on {more info to come} http://opensolaris.org/os/project/vscan/ :

$pfexec zfs set vscan=on fsname

Make some useful shares ..

$pfexec zfs create -o casesensitivity=mixed -o nbmand=on -o sharesmb=on fsname/music
$pfexec zfs create -o casesensitivity=mixed -o nbmand=on -o sharesmb=on fsname/photos
$pfexec zfs create -o casesensitivity=mixed -o nbmand=on -o sharesmb=on fsname/movies
$pfexec zfs create -o casesensitivity=mixed -o nbmand=on -o sharesmb=on fsname/backups

You can down verify your shares by doing:

$pfexec sharemgr show -vp

To access the share, connect to \\solaris-hostname\share-name

*Please do comment on anything I may of missed or needs more work.
Thanks,

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Firefox Gets the Download “Record”

It’s official: The latest version of Mozilla’s popular alternative Web browser, Firefox 3, set the Guinness World Record for most software downloads in a day. The final tally settled at 8,002,530.

If your not a FireFox user already then download today at:
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Solaris/OpenSolaris users see ''Contributed Builds" :
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0/releasenotes/
$wget http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0/contrib/solaris_pkgadd/firefox-3.0.en-US.opensolaris-i386-pkg.bz2
$bunzip2 firefox-3.0.en-US.opensolaris-i386-pkg.bz2
$pfexec pkgadd -d firefox-3.0.en-US.opensolaris-i386-pkg

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