a place in the sun

sunspot - mr. watson, come here.

2005-12-14T22:03:00.000-08:00

Sun apparently bought Watson more than a year ago and renamed it Alameda. Question is: where is it now?

sunshine - partitioning

2005-11-25T13:41:00.000-08:00

Solaris has been a mainframe OS for awhile. psradm, prctl, prset, pbind, etc gives users awesome power of processor allocation. Users can divide up system allocation for projects, dynamically change resource allocations on running processes & LWPs, start/stop CPUs all without impacting the rest of the processes on the system. Truly Solaris' power is awe inspiring.

(However I cannot imagine how I'd use this power on w2100z workstation -- probably more powerful than most x86 servers. Keyword here is workstation. I don't have dozens of CPUs as in E10K and I am not going to bother binding processes to one CPU or the other. There are only a modest number of LWPs (300 or so) and 100 or so processes. It's easy to understand how CMT, Niagra, etc will make better servers. I'd be very interested in how they will give me a better desktop.)

sunspot - DECWindows

2005-11-23T23:08:00.000-08:00

After reading Solaris Desktop Gap Analysis, I again missed OpenWindows. They have been dead for many years ago now. Two important points about OpenWindows: firstly, it gave Sun desktop a distinct look and feel; secondly, it signified Sun's committment for desktop and all that implies -- a comprehensive and cohesive set of user tools, dedication to usability and user community.

After OpenWindows we got Motif/CDE (philosophical and aesthetical decendants of DECWindows). "Beige." Boring. Ugly. Obviously designed by committee. No room for fun. Taking care of desktop was to be done by others and with others in CDE committee. In other words taking care of users was in effect outsourced.

Gnome/JDS hasn't changed anything substantial in this respect. It still feels like DECWindows/CDE. At least on DECWindows/CDE I didn't have mismashed set of look and feel from GTk, Qt, Motif, Java Swing and its set of look and feel, Xt, etc, etc. Okay, I am glad to have Gnome's terminal rather than dtterm with black foreground text on dark purple background.

Back to Solaris Desktop Gap Analysis. It's a very long and detailed. If you want a shorter analysis, read Elliott Hughes' take. "Solaris blows."

sunspot - waiting for scla

2005-11-20T12:11:00.000-08:00

When I chose to have Solaris for w2100z earlier this year I thought I could soon have my cake and eat it: stable OS and a few necessary binaries from linux until native binaries become available. I am now thinking about installing the flavor-of-the-month linux, ubuntu, because I am tired of fighting with gnuism and linuxism and often losing. Had Sun really wanted to lure Linux users to try out Solaris 10 x86, they'd have put out "Solaris Containers for Linux Applications" from Day One. Sun has been promoting it for a few years now, hasn't it?

I see that SCLA may finally appear in OpenSolaris by the end of this year. When will it show up as Solaris 10 update? 01/06 MU? And how well will it work? I found lxrun's partial support for clone() a non-starter. I just tried Solaris Express to try out BrandX preview on a spare machine but it didn't work (something wrong with display).

Zones, ZFS, Dtrace are all impressive but for everyday work I'd rather take Linux compatibility first.

sunshine - new quiet fans for w2100z

2005-07-19T21:43:00.000-07:00

w2100z is somewhat quiet now thanks to

system chassis fan #370-7716
cpu fan/heat sink #310-0020

They are not listed for sale in Sun's components list for w2100z but Sun will send them to you for free under warranty if you call.

wish list for package management system

2005-06-19T16:22:00.000-07:00

Because OpenSolaris is to be "base" of Solaris distributions, I started looking into various binary package management systems (c.f. Eric Boutilier's comparison of binary package management systems) While browsing I tried to summarize my wish list for package management system.

Maximalist base packages of libraries

Lots and lots of libraries of many kinds and of many versions. This reduces need for auto-update and dependency checks. With lots of libraries bundled, package creators can focus on binary, configuration and documentation.

Bookkeeping of packages

This feature answers questions "What are already installed?" (trivial), "To what package does this file belong?", "What packages does this package depend on?" and "What packages depend on this package?" (more interesting and useful)

Automatic dependency management and update is a convenient feature but it doesn't seem to work well with large number of packages. If installing a large dependency graph does not succeed, then uninstalling is even less likely to succeed. Also this feature introduces a risk that is difficult to assess: package installation is a blackbox process with root privileges. Convenience of having most up-to-date software is nice, but why stop there? Why not go for "zero installations?"

Namespace management (or relocatability)

It would be nice to be able to install different versions of binaries with "same" name (e.g. various versions of java). Because of Unix's global filesystem namespace, users need to mangle reified paths and $PATH and other variables. Also package creators need to be careful about how they name their packages and how they use paths outside their packages. Strictly speaking, checking for hardcoded paths inside binaries is not a (binary) package management system's job but something somehow better take care of this matter.

User level installation (Issue #1)

If a system supports relocatability, non-root user would be able to install packages under $HOME/ or elsewhere with right permissions. root is overused already and we are not in Windows.

User level installation (Issue #2)

It should be very easy for users to be able to create their private packages fast. For example, users of Python can install libraries by running a standard script setup.py that copies files to python's own library directory. Most of files in the library directory are already from Python package. New files do not belong to some package but it'd be nice to be able to put them in a package for easy maintanence.

For now I am going to stay with good ol' pkgadd and company. A package management system is yet another "trusted computing base" that can suffer from "fragile base problem" (I am mixing metaphors here). I have to trust somebody and Sun seems to be the least objectionable choice. Other package management systems are not bundled and they themselves need to be maintained like any other packages. These other systems have attractive features (e.g. pkg-get has automatic update, pkgsrc namespace and openpkg user level installation) but each one alone is not attractive enough for me to justify the cost of adding one more package management system at this time.

sunshine - http://opensolaris.org/

2005-06-13T23:57:00.000-07:00

http://opensolaris.org/ is about to open soon with OSS Solaris. Interesting times we live in!

sunshine - NVIDIA driver finally

2005-06-13T23:39:00.000-07:00

NVIDIA's driver for Quadro card is working fine now. It's driving 3360x1050 resolution nicely. As John Martin says turn on AGP with his kernel driver.

sunspot - Java2D font locator

2005-06-13T23:10:00.000-07:00

IDEA 4.5 Java IDE would dump core when looking up fonts. Symptom: try changing choice of fonts. IDEA would popup a box and go through lots of fonts and crash. This was not IDEA's fault -- JVM (java full version "1.4.2_06-b03") dumped core with a message like Assertion failed ../../../src/share/native/sun/awt/font/t2k/t1.c, line 2178. If you really want to find out what font is messing up with Java2D, export JAVA2D_DEBUGFONTS=1 and watch the debug output. It turns out that Java2D on Solaris is dumb: it reads every font file listed in /var/sadm/install/contents then chokes on the first offending font it sees. You can sorta workaround this braino by boxing Java2D:

JAVA_FONTS=../jre/lib/fonts
export JAVA_FONTS
exec $IDEA_JRE/java -Djava.awt.fonts=../jre/lib/fonts -Djava2d.font.usePlatformFont=false ...

but this is annoying and prone to error. I just grep'ed the offending font from /var/sadm/install/contents and found it to be a TeX font. Because I never use TeX, it was simpler and faster to just pkgrm SFWtetex and move on.

sunshine - zones vs others

2005-06-08T21:33:00.000-07:00

From James Dickens, a nice comparison of zones and other similar technologies such as BSD jail and User Mode Linux.

sunshine - docs.sun.com

2005-06-07T23:07:00.000-07:00

http://docs.sun.com rules.

sunshine or sunspot - opensolaris is the base

2005-06-07T12:23:00.000-07:00

Eric Boutilier from Sun writes

... under the new Solaris/Opensolaris model, in order for a Sun developer to put code into regular Solaris (the Solaris that Sun ships), he/she will have to put it into Opensolaris first. In other words, Solaris is becoming a distro, so to speak, of OpenSolaris. And Solaris engineering is already well down the path to making this happen.

I presume OpenSolaris.org will make sure that whatever OS with Solaris base will be compatible with each other? I hope this open source model doesn't lead to Balkanization of distos a la Linux.

sunspot - xorg.conf and Gnome/JDS snafu

2005-06-06T23:46:00.000-07:00

Well it's not really Sun's fault that bug like xorg.conf lives on. But if Sun had paid any attention to usability, they would've supplied a decent tool to generate xorg.conf instead of forcing users to edit that dirty garbage by hand. We are already 5 years into the 21st century but changing screen resolution is still stuck in 1980s. Editing xorg.conf was an embarrassment 10 years ago and now it's just a rancid piece of meat with prions from mad cows.

Installed NVIDIA's driver no problem but it generated xorg.conf with a limited resolution of 1280x1024 for a monitor that can handle 1680x1050. I made a typo first editing of xorg.conf; second edit fixed the typo and X server seems to come up okay. But that ghastly JDS/ Gnome desktop thingie died with an unspecified error. So now I have a completely black screen. A three-finger salute brings up a process viewer (inside Gnome's window manager but using good ol' Motif widget!) but it cannot launch any process for me so I am out of luck.

After a few resets, I finally have a desktop with full resolution. But getting here wasted almost an hour of my time. I wonder how much time I'll waste trying to make dual display work?

sunspot - NVIDIA driver

2005-05-30T10:10:00.000-07:00

Suppose you have a pair of 20" DVI monitors. With Solaris 10 on w2110z your second DVI monitor is idle and the first one shows 1280x1024 on 20". As it stands now Solaris 10 on w2100z can display only one DVI monitor at suboptimal resolution without hardware acceleration despite having NVIDIA Quadro line of high-end graphics cards. These cards are impressive (dual DVI, fast 3D, etc) and expensive (current street price is over $1300). What Sun does not tell you when you buy w2100z is that they don't yet have native driver for these awesome graphics cards. Funny that. If you install either linux or windows, you will get NVIDIA's drivers. If you install Solaris 10, you get soley limited generic nv driver.

Sun has committed two sins:

It has been misleading customer wishing to use Solaris 10 on w2100z.
A Sun exec recently said a real driver is shipping in a month or so. Considering Sun made a huge deal about NVIDIA more than 6 months ago when it launched w2100z, and Solaris 10 in the beginning of this year, we can this is way, way, late.

To my friends who are interested in w2100z, I advise to be aware of this problem and the noise problem (see below). Both are fixable to be sure but it's been bitterly disappointing to see Sun handle them so poorly.

update 2005-06-03 Finally NVIDIA driver is out. There are long threads at solarisx86 list about it. I'll wait another week and try it out.

sunspot - w2100z is deafeningly noisy

2005-05-28T09:03:00.000-07:00

w2100z is unusable as a workstation because it is the noisiest machine I've ever heard. I suspect hardware designers of w2100z are deaf. Either they were deaf from the start of designing w2100z or became deaf by the end of it. Otherwise how do you explain their choice of roaring, deafening jet engine of a case fan (120mm, no less)? Even rack mounted servers are quieter than this. I am ordering a new quieter fan and a pair of earplugs. I rather would have paid Sun $300, $400 more for quieter water cooled system. It's shocking that Sun missed such an obvious defect.

sunrise, sunshine, sunspot, sunset

2005-05-28T08:56:00.000-07:00

sunrise.

I'll blog about Sun Microsystems' Solaris 10 and Java Workstation w2100z. Posts with "sunshine" in titles will praise SUNW, Solaris 10 or w2100z. Posts with "sunspot" will complain. Other posts will fall somewhere in-between.