OpenSolaris distro - AuroraUX makes Frontpage of Reddit !

Reddit Article.

I know I have not updated my blog in a year or so now, Simply not had the time due to working on AuroraUX^[1] and LLVM/Clang and Compiler-RT (Our toolchain) upstream as well so that everyone will benefit.

I think there maybe is a bit of misconception that we are trying to reinvent the wheel totally.

This of course is not practical to make a *usable* OS today.

We simply just would like to bring together some partially good technologies such as LLVM and rewrite some things in Unix that have long needed a revisit for usage on the desktop in 2009 and onwards.

A good quality window manager that is not over convoluted, stable and no memory leaks however still easy to use and very *fast*/desktop interactiveness is key.

We would like to revisit Xorg, However we need more developer traction and needs to be talked about in a lot of depth. However a rewrite of the Unix windowing system is far more needed then yet another kernel. Something portable that everyone can benefit from, not just AuroraUX.

Please do drop around #auroraux on irc.freenode.net and say good day.

Cheers,
Edward.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AuroraUX

Thinking out loud.

I saw this NetBook today,
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/150183

So I thought to myself; Would it not be more:

* Cost effective.
* Environmentally friendly.
* Safer (data safety).
* Accessible.

To consolidate a students, business worker or home user for that matter compute needs onto a home server.

Your home server will consolidate all your data saftly on ZFS which is setup to snap shot your VM's at the end of each week (Friday evening say..) so that if your VM of XP gets a virus or whatever, your protected. If your laptop gets lost, stolen or the HDD fails or you need to upgrade it. There is no need to move your data around.

Also, you could be in a airport or internet cafe or even at a friends house and you need access to *your* computer, then its just a matter of calling up FireFox and logging into your home server.

A example config would be something like as follows;

* At least 3 SATA disks to keep your data safe in a zfs mirror with a hot spare.
* One of them nice new AMD quad cores that are so cheap these days.
* A low end Tyan MB with a few SATA ports and a nforce chipset such as a Tomcat n3400B (S2925-E).
* At least 4GB of Kingston value RAM, its dead cheap so why not !

You can grab most of the above hardware from ebuyer.co.uk and scan.co.uk or newegg.com in the US.

In regards to software configuration;

* Fresh install of Sun xVM server. - http://xvmserver.org
* A VM of Windows XP SP3 as you prob use that.
* A VM of SXCE setup with SSGD/VDI. - http://www.opensolaris.org

You can grab VDI from; http://www.sun.com/software/vdi/
SSGD from; http://www.sun.com/software/products/sgd

All of the above software is free.

I will follow this blog up with another that outlines the compleate setup of the above.

~
Edward.

VirtualBox 2.0.2 is out !!!

I highly recommend people upgrade to this release, in particular Solaris hosts.
As this rev. seems to have solved a kernel panic I had from vbox :/

Downloads here: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
and
Release Notes here: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog

~
Edward.

Intel(R) WiFi Link 5100/5300 Driver in ON 99.

yay for the integration of the Intel(R) WiFi Link 5100/5300 Driver in ON/Net 99.
Looking forward to snv_99 updated LiveCD ISO.

Regards,
Edward.

VirtualBox 1.6.6 is out !!

VirtualBox 1.6.6 (released 2008-08-26)
A *must* for any snv_95+ user due to the fix for strange linker issue that was seen.
yay!
Change Logs here: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog
and
Download here: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Regards,
Edward.

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.

~

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.
~

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,

~

Become part of the official Guinness World Record

.:: Today you'll make history with Fire Fox 3 ::.

Are you ready to make history?
Are you ready to set a World Record?
Today is Download Day.

To become part of the official Guinness World Record you must download Firefox 3 by 17:00 UTC on June 18, 2008, or roughly 24 hours from now.

Download Fire Fox 3

Don't forget to pass the message on to your friends and family.

OpenSolaris and Blastwave

As you may all know Blastwave is one of the main providers for software on the Solaris platform.

See:
http://www.blastwave.org/

http://www.opensolaris.com/

Now that OpenSolaris is out on the street one may like to have things like VLC and Mplayer installed but may not be about to find anything in the pkg.opensolaris.org IPS respo.

This is just a short howto on getting Blastwave working with OpenSolaris using IPS in just *2* easy steps.

1) Add Free repositories to your IPS / PKG tools configuration:

$pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://blastwave.network.com:10000 blastwave
$pfexec pkg authority -H

blastwave http://blastwave.network.com:10000/

opensolaris.org (preferred) http://pkg.opensolaris.org/

$pfexec pkg refresh

2) Installing _Stuff_ :

$pkg search -r vlc

$pfexec pkg install IPSvlc

and that's it !

Oh, A side note; I like to have OpenOffice and NetBeans installed from pkg.opensolaris.org

We can do this as follows:

$pfexec pkg install netbeans

$pfexec pkg install openoffice

That's all..

~

SXCE A decent media play experience..

Songbird, is a media player built on top of Firefox.
Now you maybe wondering why build a media player out of a web browser. Well here is the short answer:

Music is social and so is the internet. It can also be noted that the internet is very big but we have a excellent modern day tool, you guest it, a web browser to navigate this landscape.
However, your media library is not far off the kind of landscape that this internet is, in one word, cluttered. In other words you end up not knowing what you got and what you don't have..
To add to this, much of your media content is now becoming more and more part of your online experience such as internet radio and music/artist blogs. So why not fuse all this together with the web browser ?

Welcome to the Songbird media player (main site) :
http://www.songbirdnest.com/
(Solaris port) :
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/nightingale/

Install Howto for "Songbird 0.5 release for Solaris x86" :

$/usr/sfw/bin/wget http://releases.mozilla.com/sun/Songbird-Solaris/Songbird_0.5_solaris-i386.tar.bz2
$bunzip2 -cd Songbird_0.5_solaris-i386.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -
$su
_root-password_
#mv Songbird_0.5 /opt/
#exit
$/opt/Songbird_0.5/songbird &

And that's all.. :~)

Regards,
Edward.

SXCE on the Desktop

Solaris is a great and highly advanced OS, it has many features that can be used on the home desktop as well as enterprise class systems that run the very core of the Internet, Supercomputers (HPC) and Banks. One of my favourite such features is the ZFS file system.

However, for people who have used GNU/Linux, such as Ubuntu, and are trying out Solaris for the first time may have the first impressions that Solaris is somehow slower then Linux.
This is however not the case. Solaris has many things running under the hood that servers would find useful but Desktop users have no such use for, such as ssh running or sendmail.

SXCE or Solaris Express Community Edition can be downloaded here for free:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/downloads/
You can check your hardware with this neat tool:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/hcts/device_detect.jsp
(Click "Start Sun Device Detection Tool 2.0" on the page.)

After a default install, login and choice JDS as your default desktop session, now right click on the desktop and run the following in the terminal:
------------

$su
_root-password_
#/bin/zsh
#svcadm disable basicreg cde-calendar-manager cde-ttdbserver cde-printinfo webconsole wbem sendmail sac ssh autofs ipsec/policy ipsec/ipsecalgs
#echo "set maxphys=4194304" >> /etc/system
#dispadmin -d IA
#shutdown -y -g0 -i6

------------
After this your desktop should be both more secure and more interactive.

If you find anything more you would like to add, please comment.
If you would like to learn more, see:

docs.sun.com

Regards,
Edward.