New Toy

So, my machine situation just improved considerably late this last week. I got a nice Sun Ultra 20 in the mail from Sun, which is going to considerably improve my hacking situation at home.

I briefly tried out Solaris, but ran into a number of issues that I didn’t know how to fix. I was a bit impatient and since the manual said I’d have to reinstall to get a multiboot system anyway, I just replaced it with Linux. I made sure to leave some extra freespace, and part of that will be used for putting OpenSolaris back on it at some point. You Sun people on planet Gnome should expect some questions when I get around to it. 🙂

The fc6test3 x86_64 cds I downloaded and tried to install from gave me a kernel panic relatively early on in the install process. Doh! Still need to retry that and record a few more details so I can report it. So, I decided to go with i386…

Turns out that getting Rawhide installed (already had FC5 cds to do a basic install and wanted to use yum to update) was a tad messier than expected on the initial stages, then super smooth after that. The initial stages should have been just editing /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora*.repo to change some “enabled=” lines and then running a “yum update”. But, hal conflicted with the installed fc5 kernel, so I had to update the kernel separately. When I tried out the new kernel, I got a frozen system at boot. So I retried at runlevel one and found that manually switching to runlevel 3 showed lots of

security_compute_av: unrecognized class 57

messages. So, I updated any package looking at all related to selinux, then tried out the new kernel again. At that point it worked, so I removed the old kernel. At that point “yum update” worked, and everything has worked without a hitch so far since then. I was actually somewhat shocked since yum upgrades aren’t exactly well documented and seem less supported, and the fact that fc6 is still a few weeks from release; but it has been very smooth.

So, some stuff is up and running and I still definitely have a lot more messing around to do. But it also has allowed me to get some of the metacity patches reviewed (though I’ve got a ton left; there’s been tons submitted recently, particularly by Carlo Wood), and do some bugzilla work as well. All in all, a nice new fun toy. 🙂

4 thoughts on “New Toy”

  1. Ugh, for a moment my reading perception failed me and I thought you were talking about a SPARCstation 20 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation_20), and thought, poor fellow;)

    A bit odd for Sun to reuse the “20” number, but then, probably not that many potential buyers automatically associate the combination “Sun” and “20” with the SPARCstation 20 like I did 😉

  2. Drop by #opensolaris on irc.freenode.org and we will be happy to help you work around any problems you had getting solaris installed and working for you.

    The ultra 20 is a nice machine, I have one in fact.

  3. The kernel panic is pretty likely to be a known issue (it affected a lot of x86-64 users). It turned out that the installer got confused, and forgot to install an initrd.

    If you boot to rescue mode (boot cd1, and type ‘linux rescue’), you’ll be able to run mkinitrd by hand, and build one.

    (or you could just grab the fc6pre ISOs which have this fixed now).

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