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.
For a long time, GNOME, or Solaris, has been a second class citizen with each other – I’m not entirely sure which way around it should be. As a desktop team it’s been somewhat frustrating having to rip all sorts of features out of our releases on Solaris, simply because we haven’t been able to come up with a substitute for them due to time constraints – whether because they just needed porting to the Solaris API, or because there was no substitute within the Solaris kernel.
Today I started writing that list, partly because of the guilt for not having written it before but also because I believe it would be really useful to have once OpenSolaris is released. I’m also guilty of not dog-fooding GNOME on Solaris a little more, and suffering in my jocks for a while. Hopefully Solaris will get some more desktop focus over the next year or two.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love Linux and I believe in the development structure and culture that has been created around the project. I was hugely impresed by Andrew Morton’s keynote at linux.conf.au – many things he said were so very true of the management of just about every software project. I hope the OpenSolaris community can amount to the same.
tberman did warn me, but I figured the 7.9 out of 10 review on IMBD was past my threshold and would be enough. Sadly, it wasn’t. I’ve read the book, listened to the radio series, and seen the BBC tv series. It was a nice attempt but, for me, sadly fell flat on its face. None of the characters were instantly likeable, and it departed a long way from the original storyline.
I think I’ve got more involved in the GUADEC planning than I originally planned to. It’s actually quite therapeutic in many ways – having a list of easy tasks to fulfill proves to be a nice change of direction compared to my daily duties within Sun.
However, this year, the GUADEC experience is going to be relatively short. I have no Foundation Board or Advisory Board committments, so that takes 2 days out of my schedule.
I could spend those days touring around Germany – going on the tour of Esslingen, or visiting some places around town. However, those 5 days are the few days each year that I get to see old faces and catch up.
So I’m not going to waste time touring around the place. I’m going to spend that time talking shit and hopefully brainstorming for GNOME’s future, most probably in a pub somewhere. Feel free to join me!
