Tag Archives: openindiana

Solaris 10 Patch Where?

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If you haven’t noticed, Solaris 10 is not available for free anymore. At least the patches. It’s Oracle after all.

Security patches were originally available for free when Sun stil exists but not anymore now. From PCA site:

Unlike before, even security patches are not available for free anymore.

So you’re screwed if you don’t have one. You’re better off installing OpenIndiana instead.

In case you’re one of the lucky folks (like me /hahahaha) having office Oracle account with Solaris support contract, I suggest checking out PCA to ease up installing patches. Also make sure to install it through OpenCSW for easiest update method.

ZFS on Desktop – Which OS?

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I’ve been thinking about this lately, especially after seeing this:

[root@einhart ~]# pkg_version -vIL=>
binutils-2.21 < needs updating (index has 2.21.1)
bitstream-vera-1.10_4 < needs updating (index has 1.10_5)
chromium-12.0.742.112 < needs updating (index has 12.0.742.124)
droid-fonts-ttf-20100214_1 < needs updating (index has 20110324)
exiv2-0.21,1 < needs updating (index has 0.21.1,1)
gawk-3.1.8 < needs updating (index has 4.0.0)
gcc-4.6.2.20110701 < needs updating (index has 4.6.2.20110708)
gnutls-2.12.7_1 < needs updating (index has 2.12.7_2)
libidn-1.19 < needs updating (index has 1.22)
openjdk6-b22_6 < needs updating (index has b23)
p5-Net-DBus-0.33.6 < needs updating (index has 1.0.0)
p5-libwww-5.837 Fetching ‘/usr/ports/www/chromium’

To build Chromium, you should have around 1 GB of memory
and a fair amount of free diskspace (~ 1.5GB).

===> Vulnerability check disabled, database not found
===> License BSD LGPL21 MPL accepted by the user
===> Found saved configuration for chromium-12.0.742.112
=> chromium-courgette-redacted-12.0.742.124.tar.xz doesn’t seem to exist in /usr/ports/distfiles/.
=> Attempting to fetch http://download.goodking.org/downloads/chromium-courgette-redacted-12.0.742.124.tar.xz
chromium-courgette-redacted-12.0.742.124.tar.x 0% of 114 MB 35 kBps^C

And did you notice that “you should have around 1 GB of memory and a fair amount of free diskspace”? Yeah, it does use that much memory to update a web browser. Something that takes few seconds on Windows and Fedora and few minutes on Ubuntu takes almost hours to do on FreeBSD. Downloading source notwithstanding, compiling it also takes long, long time.

If anything, this is why I hate FreeBSD. And you will mention use package except that there’s no H.264 video support and possible chance of conflicting package difference between my system and the buildbot. As much as I want to use binary packages, they come in unwanted forms:

* GNOME 2 pulls Samba4 for God knows why reason
* Some pacakges don’t have optimization enabled
* Mplayer doesn’t have VDPAU
* Some packages must be installed manually (Java, Opera)
* Portupgrade takes minutes to compute what to do (something which is done in seconds in Ubuntu)

As much as I can tolerate this shit, the very fact that VirtualBox under FreeBSD takes much more CPU certainly doesn’t help.

So, I guess I’ll try yet another OS. There are several options so here are overview of current choices.

FreeBSD
——-
Pros:

* Extremely simple
* Up to date packages
* Highly customizable
* Stable ZFS

Cons:

* Customization comes at cost: compile time
* No good virtualization option
* A package management that is comparable with slowpoke
* No flash (yes there’s linux flashplugin ports but it’s a joke)
* Awesomely slow video playback even optimized on Firefox

PC-BSD
——
Pros:

* Based on FreeBSD, has some of familiarity
* Binary packages that’s not too slow
* Stable ZFS

Cons:

* Also no good virtualization
* Epic size of packages (eg. [a hundred megabytes for Firefox](http://www.pbidir.com/bt/pbi/49/firefox))

OpenIndiana
———–
Pros:

* Stable, greatest ZFS
* Zones
* Good VirtualBox support
* Flash support

Cons:

* Complex
* Doesn’t survive trivial hardware change without Live CD/USB
* ACL
* Outdated packages
* Non-existent packages
* Manual compiling of `mplayer` is a must since the defaults on various repositories are crap
* Still beta
* Doesn’t recognize FreeBSD’s GPT (at least on `oi_148`)
* Ugly freetype2 (no support for subpixel hinting apart of manual compile)

Ubuntu Linux
————
Pros:

* Latest, greatest software
* Good software support
* Good virtualization

Cons:

* Unstable ZFS
* Linux

Note that I only include Ubuntu in Linux category since it’s the only OS having both working nvidia driver and precompiled ZFS module, saving me lots of headaches.

Audio volume control from shell in OpenIndiana

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I might be missing something but the volume control for OpenIndiana is a bit lackluster in display department compared to FreeBSD’s. In FreeBSD, whenever I do a volume change I get to see the values; before and after – but not in OpenIndiana; its default shell-based mixer quite sucks and doesn’t give enough feedback whenever I change volume.

There’s a good reason I keep bash as my main shell – I can script in POSIX sh and keep the sane shell at the same time (as opposed to using actual POSIX sh). So here’s the function I recently created; when given no parameter will display current volume and when given one parameter will change the volume and display how the change goes.

vol() {
getvol() { audioctl show-control volume | awk ‘/^volume/ { print $2 }’; }
printf “%s: ” “Volume”
if [ -n “$1” ]; then
printf “%s => ” “$(getvol)”
audioctl set-control volume “$1”
fi
printf “%sn” “$(getvol)”
}

It should be pretty much POSIX but remember that it will only work in Solaris Express 11 (probably) and OpenIndiana (tested with oi_148).

Solaris zones’ (first) boot error

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If you encounter error like this on first zone boot:

SunOS Release 5.11 Version oi_148 64-bit                                        
Copyright (c) 1983, 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.    
svc.configd: Fatal error: "boot" backup failed: rename(/etc/svc/repository-boot-tmpHSa4Hq, /etc/svc/repository-boot-20110427_123458): Permission denied         
svc.configd: Fatal error: unable to create "boot" backup of "/etc/svc/repository.db"                                                                            
Loading smf(5) service descriptions: 98/98                                      
svc.configd: Fatal error: "manifest_import" backup failed: rename(/etc/svc/repository-manifest_import-tmpJSa4Hq, /etc/svc/repository-manifest_import-20110427_123527): Permission denied                                                        
svc.configd: Fatal error: Backend copy failed: rename /etc/svc/repository.db-KSa4Hq to /etc/svc/repository.db: Permission denied                                
svc.configd: Fatal error: Backend copy failed: remove /etc/svc/repository.db-KSa4Hq: Permission denied                                                          
Requesting System Maintenance Mode                                              
(See /lib/svc/share/README for more information.)                               
svc:/system/early-manifest-import:default exited with status 95                 
                                                                                
Enter user name for system maintenance (control-d to bypass):

Check your zfs setting, particularly nbmand and atime parameter. I myself set nbmand to off and atime to on for the zones’ zfs filesystem and it booted fine.

mplayer2 on openindiana

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Some points:

  • Yes, it’s doable. Use mplayer2-build helper
  • You have to install many things (mainly autotools and don’t forget system audio header). Also yasm from opencsw
  • With regard to autotools, you have to create symlink for few things and put it somewhere in your PATH, preferably before everything else (namely ginstall -> install, aclocal-1.10 -> aclocal, automake-1.10 -> automake)
  • Add –cc=gcc to common_options

Probably there are some more but that’s all I can remember right now. Should also applicable for opensolaris (why are you still using it) and Solaris Express 11.

If you want to enable SSE support, you have to apply some patches to mplayer.

If you want to use vdpau while using nvidia’s latest driver, you have to install libvdpau.