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.

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.