number 9

Today is OpenSolaris’ first birthday.

What I’ve seen of it so far (reading docs and running SXCR for a few months) has been overwhelmingly good:

• dtrace is what $DEITY must’ve used to debug the universe
• zones give you the isolation and partitioning of Xen/VMware, without the hassle/licensing issues
• if you haven’t seen ZFS then you must have been living in a cave. Madre de dios – the legends were true.
• SMF is a neat idea (vaguely reminds me of what I was trying to do with ratking), a bit over-engineered for my taste
• the community seem a good bunch (and they could’ve easily been assholes)
• I tried x86 Solaris a few years back and hardware support was shit, frankly. SXCR is worlds better.
• releases ship on time and bug reports get addressed
• BSD quality docs/manpages

with a few warts:

• package management and bugfixing is lacking. Something like apt-get update would be wonderful (to be fair, SXCR isn’t a production release, and I’m too new to know how they do this on planet Solaris)
• the installer is a bit clanky compared to most free -NIXes – choices are mainly ‘5gb of crap’ or ‘a kernel and a shell’ (again, I only just got here. Solaris natives point me at Jumpstart etc. as a more usual way to put a system together)
• you have to register to download it (only takes a minute, but it’s still a pain in the arse)

As I said, I know practically Jack about it. There’s a linkdump on Ben Rockwoods blog if you want to pick through the code, join mailing lists, etc.

Sun genuinely seem to be trying to open up across the board, from the Ultrasparc to Java (and their new hardware is just gorgeous). It’s easy to point out where they aren’t quite there yet, but I don’t remember another company doing this to such an extent before, so give them a break. Anyway, give it a whirl when you have a bit of spare time.

Still not sure about that ponytail though.

It’s taken a year, but Google Earth finally went Linux.

The installer is pretty neat – you don’t need root, and everything goes into one folder with all dependencies, so it’s easy to deinstall. It worked acceptably on my crappy asus laptop too, which was a big surprise.

When I stuck it on my desktop, I got warnings that performance would stink because I had no hardware OpenGL (judging by the number of questions on ubuntu-users, I’m not the only one).

I have an Nvidia card, I just never needed 3D before (shows how lazy I’ve got, I used to regularly handbuild DRI support into FreeBSD4). So thought I’d enable DRI:

$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx
$ # needs linux-image-386 instead of the 686 image
$ # (hyperthreaded p4, but haven't noticed a performance hit)
$ sudo nvidia-xconfig
$ # tweaks your Xorg.conf (makes a backup, don't worry)
$ sudo reboot

When X next starts, I get an Nvidia logo and the desktop is a whole lot snappier.
More to the point, Google Earth now flies (and xscreensaver does’nt intermittently DOS the box any more)

Still no Sketchup for Linux, so I can’t build Isengard in my garden yet. Bah.