More language discussions on Planet GNOME between the Mono and Java camps. Should make GUADEC a fun conference at the end of the month. Would be nice to get some Sun Java guys into the discussion.
So with GUADEC nearly upon us, it’s time to do some forward planning for next years conference. Where shall we be in 2006? Do we change the format? Do we tag on to a bigger conference? Lots of questions that we have to start thinking about, and I’ve put up a wiki page for GuadecPlanning.
I sat down and spent an hour and a half watching the coverage of Sun’s Network Computing, 05Q2 – you can sort of see why there’s a big sell going on with some of the technology being shown. The N1 grid demo was fantastic [45:30 in the stream].
Aside from that, there was some pretty incredible stats – eBay have 147 million registered users, and $1344 of business transactions happening *every second*. Apparently they have a bit of Sun hardware too.
Awesome, as pointed out by Oz, this book is out now. I had the privilege of reading a draft a couple of years ago, and I was deeply impressed. I’d recommend everyone to get their hands on a copy and have a read – I suspect I’m preaching to the crowd for the vast numbers of blog readers though.
For a while my Dell Optiplex 280 has sat on my desk. It’s been a long term plan to get it installed with Solaris x86. After getting one set of pre-GA disks, I tried my first install [feeling like I’m back in Debian land without a nice GUI installer] to no avail. A few builds later and some more CDs shipped from Ireland, we were up and running in no time. All good, and JDS looking pretty darn nice.
Then it sat unconnected on my desk for a while, until today when I finally decided to figure out the networking. Now networking scares the willies out of me. Plain and simple – it’s voodoo. I remember doing a Solaris admin course a few years ago, but unfortunately didn’t have any of the course notes to hand. Time to google search.
I found a nice introductory site about how to setup the network, and then realized that my ethernet wasn’t being recognized. On forums.sun.com where someone else had a similar experience with their ethernet device. All good so far. I tried the current bge driver, but that didn’t seem to work. I found a Broadcom driver, downloaded it, and learned out to get mass storage working under Solaris 10. Kill vold, mkdir /rmdisk, and reboot was enough to cure that, and quickly transferred it over using my compact flash card. Sweet.
Installing the package was relatively easy, although I had to re-run the postinstall scripts since there was already pci devices registered in my driver_alias file – pretty scarey. Reboot, and still no beans. Figured out the pci device number from a prtconf, added that to the alias file, created hostname.bcme0 and dhcp.dcme0 to get DHCP working, and reboot to get working network for a few minutes…until –
WARNING: bcme: coding error detected, the driver is using ddi_dma_attr(9S) incorrectly. There is a small risk of data corruption in particular with large I/Os. The driver should be replaced with a corrected version for proper system operation. To disable this warning, add 'set rootnex:rootnex_bind_warn=0' to /etc/system(4).
WARNING: pci14e4,1677 - bcme0: Failed to bind handle!
Bugger.
Wandered around the web again, and noticed that there was an updated driver available – I had stupidly downloaded the driver from some random site, without checking with Broadcom first. Downloaded the package, installed it, and after a quick reboot, hey presto it worked out of the box. More than can be said about the last 2 releases of Ubuntu, unfortunately.
So it wasn’t really that hard afterall, and it was probably good experience to get used to some of the Solaris commands and file locations [shudder], but expecting my mother to do this is another thing. We have a long way to go.
So why can’t I?…It’s having some pretty uncanny results though, especially on Planet Freedesktop.
Wow, I just love the new look of sun.com. I’m actually really excited to see this change, because not only is it a change in the websites, it’s also a push to make our entire product line consistant. I just wonder though, if it’s easily possible if it’s possible to push that out to some of the internal websites as well – a much bigger task I suspect.
After hearing G.Love and Special Sauce at the Jack Johnson concert last month, I bought ‘The Hustle’ when I was over in Sydney. It’s a really excellent album. As described on Amazon ‘This CD is better than leomanade on a summer’s day in the sweet sasparilla purple forest’. It really is that good. I suspect it’s going to be fricken hard to get some of his other albums over here.
Finished off Richard Branson’s autobiography at the weekend. All in all, it was a thoroughly fascinating read and was far from the dullness of most other business type autobiographies I expect. I’ve been watching his TV reality show ‘The Rebel Billionaire’, where he attempts to get someone to take his place within the Virgin Group. It’s been a pretty entertaining look into how shrewd a person he is, and what characteristics he looks for from the contestants – far from your standard run of the mill reality show. That also came out in his book, but also the humility to admit where’s he has made mistakes in the past. Definitely plane material, and kinda wished I had left it until my flight to GUADEC.
Next on the reading list is to finish off Dan Brown’s ‘Angels and Daemons’, and to make a start on Michael Connolly’s series of crime novels.
Okay, so the title is Hollywood-izing the current situation, but with the latest discussion on various blogs, I decided to create a new freeform session at GUADEC, TrainWreck. As Jeff commented, it’s likely to be an extention to the Topaz session on the GUADEC schedule.
Feel free to add to it.
