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

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.

Broadcom 5722 NIC support under Solaris.

<6726056>
http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6726056
http://cia.vc/stats/project/opensolaris/.message/33f940

snv_97>.

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.
~

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.

~

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.

Boycott Laptops with Broadcom WiFi

"It seems to be a recurring theme, but we keep hearing about different WLAN parts that don't work with NDIS wrapper, or other problems building the NDIS wrapper etc.

I've never used the NDIS wrapper, and I refuse to do so. I also refuse to purchase or recommend any laptop with a Broadcom WLAN part on it, at least until Broadcom changes their position and makes it possible for 3rd parties (even under NDA) to develop device drivers for their WLAN products.

The reason is simple: until laptop manufacturers start losing sales due to people who take the same position, they won't stop including Broadcom WLAN on their products. The loss of a few individual WLAN cards won't impact Broadcom at all, but if Gateway or Dell stops purchasing WLAN parts, then its a whole new ballgame. And the more laptop vendors that we can get to understand that use of Broadcom leads to lost sales, the more impact it will have.

Either Broadcom will take notice, and correct their behavior (e.g. by offering 3rd parties access to device driver info under NDA, writing drivers themselves for platforms like OpenSolaris, or even better, offering up open technical specs), or their WLAN products will gradually fade from popularity so that they are no longer relevant.

To be honest, I don't care which result comes about. But please, don't use or purchase Broadcom WLAN. And to those of you writing neat things like NDIS wrapper and reverse engineering efforts like the bwi driver in *BSD, I'd recommend you rethink whether enabling further sales of laptops bundled with Broadcom WLAN is really something you want to encourage.

(For specific alternatives to Broadcom WLAN, look for either Intel or Atheros WIFI.)"

by Garrett D'Amore - gdamore.blogspot.com

This applies to Windows and Linux as well as OpenSolaris, FreeBSD & NetBSD users.

Upgrading OpenSolaris2008.05 to snv90.

Many of you have installed and are running the first spin of the OpenSolaris distro, that is OpenSolaris2008.05 and have been wondering why SXCE have still been leading the way while OS has been falling behind out of sync with SXCE.

Well now the first update is out that will bring us up to sync with every second ON release. Just with a simple;

pfexec pkg refresh ; pfexec pkg image-update

However,
As this is the first update, it has its own problems.
Two bug trackers here:

http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=2119 (Pidgin does not start)
http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=1989 (Connection times out while installing or upgrading packages)

Both can be solve and I hope to illustrate that here.

Let start with the upgrade (~1GB download):
Bring up a default BASH shell by right clicking on the desktop:

$export PKG_CLIENT_TIMEOUT=120
$pfexec pkg refresh ; pfexec pkg image-update
.. This make take some time, make a coffee and relax.

"PAY ATTENTION TO THE ATTACHED UPDATE PROCEDURE!!! Failure to do so will
prevent your system from rebooting."

"Instructions to update OpenSolaris 2008.05 to build 89 or later
================================================================
The command "pkg image-update" can be used to update an OpenSolaris
2008.05 system to build 89 or later. However due to changes in the
GRUB boot system, one must manually update the Master Boot Record (MBR)
to include these latest changes.

When "pkg image-update" completes successfully, it will print a message
of the form

A clone of opensolaris exists and has been updated and
activated. On next boot the Boot Environment opensolaris-1 will
be mounted on '/'. Reboot when ready to switch to this updated
BE.

The name of the newly created clone can also be seen by looking for the
"Active on reboot" entry in the output of the "beadm list" command

$ beadm list
BE Active Active on Mountpoint Space
Name reboot Used
---- ------ --------- ---------- -----
opensolaris-1 no yes - 17.06M
opensolaris yes no - 33.92M

First, mount the clone under the /mnt directory

$ pfexec mount -F zfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris-1 /mnt

Next, update the GRUB configuration on your ZFS boot device(s) using

$ pfexec /mnt/boot/solaris/bin/update_grub -R /mnt

When you're ready to boot into the updated boot environment, you can
reboot(1M) or init(1M) as usual."
*Details taken from:
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=62982&tstart=0

After the reboot you can fix Pidgin by doing the following:

$cd /usr/lib/purple-2/
$pfexec elfedit ssl-nss.so
> dyn:runpath
elfedit: [14: .dynamic]: no runpath (DT_RPATH or DT_RUNPATH) found
> dyn:runpath /usr/lib/%I:/usr/lib:/usr/lib/mps:/usr/lib/mps/%I
   index  tag                value
    [39]  RUNPATH           0x39c            
/usr/lib/%I:/usr/lib:/usr/lib/mps:/usr/lib/mps/%I
> quit
elfedit: Output ELF file has changes pending. Use 'write' to save them, or
'quit -f' to exit without saving
> write
> quit
$

If you find any problems leave a message and remember please do report bugs if you find them.
http://defect.opensolaris.org

Edward.
~

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 and Basic Networking.

For this instalment we are going to look into basic network knowledge in Solaris.
There are two ways to configure networking in Solaris, the first of which is a tool known as Network Auto-Magic or nwam(1).
By running:

$svcs -x network/physical:nwam

Provides the status if nwam is online or not, Network Auto-Magic is a project to simplify and automate network configuration on Solaris. Basically autoconfigures your NIC from your local DHCP/DNS server.

However, It is some times necessary configure a static IP or provide DNS infomation manually. To to manually configure networking in Solaris one must disable this service in favour of the default by doing the following:

$su
_root-password_
#/bin/zsh
#svcadm enable network/physical:default

Things you should keep at hand are:
* IP Address of the System
* Hostname
* Subnet Files: /etc/netmasks
* Default gateway
* DNS Server list. Files: /etc/nsswitch.conf *and* /etc/resolv.conf

Then you can configure each of the above as follows:

Static:

* IP Address (192.168.1.3) and Hostname (solarisrox)
#echo '192.168.1.3 solarisrox' >> /etc/hosts; echo 'solarisrox' > /etc/hostname.hme0"

N.B. Assuming that hme0 was the interface you wanted to use.
Hint: Can be found with ifconfig -a
*Default gateway (192.168.1.1)
#echo 10.0.0.255 > /etc/defaultrouter

DHCP:

#echo "" > /etc/hostname.hme0 > /etc/dhcp.hme0 > /etc/defaultrouter
#echo "wait 15" >> /etc/dhcp.hme0

DNS:

First check /etc/nsswitch.conf for the line "hosts: dns files" is ok.
Then inside /etc/resolv.conf check to make sure it looks something like this:

search myisp.com
nameserver 1.2.3.4
nameserver 5.6.7.8

After all your configuration you can simply restart the network service as follows:

#svcadm restart network/physical:default

Comments are always welcome..

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.