a FNGs eye view of Opensolaris

Posted by Dick on June 14, 2006

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.

your search for enlightenment returned 25,343 hits

Posted by Dick on September 25, 2005

I’ve used DVORAK layouts since I got RSI. I chose a layout in xorg.conf, and any other users of the laptop would just think the keys were broken. You can change the console keyboard map, but usually only if you’re root.

When I tried Ubuntu the other day, it came with GNOME it had really improved in the last 18 months, and came with a keyboard switcher applet, which was dead handy. Recently, slow start times made me look at alternatives – but none had keyboard switching.

I had a google for some X11 key switching commands (I feel no shame in not knowing X low level stuff like this, life is far too short). I wasn’t looking forward to the output, but this little gem popped out. I’m hereby freed up to look at other wms. Just add it to your .profile and marvel at a truly elegant hack:

alias aoeu="setxkbmap us"
alias asdf="setxkbmap dvorak"

(Typing break reminder would be nice, but that’s just another google). I know that says more about my laziness than anything else, but I wonder how many GUI users who swear they couldn’t do without some platform or app actually mean they need one tiny part of it’s feature set, and are just a google away from deliverance.