www.ルイス.org

I’ve had a half-drafted blog entry sat around for about two months now.  I started to write it after I did an initial install of a (at the time) bleeding-edge copy of Solaris Nevada.

For those that don’t know, Nevada is the code-name for the next version of the Solaris operating system, Solaris 11.  Nevada is actively developed where all of the new features, improvements, bugs and bug fixes end up before they get putback to Solaris 10 in the form of updates or patches.

Most of Sun runs on Solaris 10 Sun Ray servers, but in the department I work we run and maintain our own servers: one runs Solaris 10 and three run Solaris Nevada.  By choice I use Nevada for the more recent version of the Java Desktop System or GNOME.

In an office workstation role, Nevada/GNOME works surprisingly well.  From time to time Solaris does panic, but the bug is always logged and fixes come in with future builds.  At home, on a stand-alone desktop PC, both Solaris Nevada and Solaris 10 fall well short of the current mark, which I will define to be somewhere in between Windows Vista, Mac OS X and, of course, Ubuntu Feisty Fawn.

As a long-term Ubuntu user I can’t help but cringe when I look at various aspects of the normal Nevada installation, use and maintenance.  Depend on moods in the office, brining these problems up elicits one of two responses:

1. Yes, but… the Linux kernel sucks.  There’s no stable driver API, it crashes a lot, it’s a hackers’ OS, etc.  My response to this is: so what?  Solaris is no use to anybody at all if it requires n hours a week/month in maintenance, doesn’t work with their hardware and can’t run their applications.  Years ago when I tried to convert my Dad to Linux his reason not to was quite simply that it didn’t run his accounting software.  And besides… my desktop crashes less frequently than the Sun Ray servers at work (not a fair comparison, I know).


2. Yes, but… nobody is willing to do the work, it isn’t a priority, businesses don’t want it, etc.  This is definitely a more reasonable response.

So what is Solaris Nevada lacking that Ubuntu already provides:

1. Package management, package management, package management.  For the enterprise the current solution might be acceptable, but desktop users need to be able to painlessly install updates.  Basically what Solaris needs is apt-get/dpkg.


2. Installation.  The Solaris installation is archaic, although it does mostly work.  The text interface scares newcomers (even intermediate/advanced ones) off.  Nevada needs to pay close attention to what Microsoft have done with Vista and Ubuntu are doing with their live CD installers.


3. Software.  Ubuntu ships with a sensible set of default utilities, applications and configuration tools.  For the most part, so does Nevada.  But what Nevada (and Windows and OS X) doesn’t offer is a single interface to find more software for a given task.  This is where I bring up (again) apt-get, but this time in conjunction with a great big repository of software, one very similar to those offered by Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, SuSE, etc.


4. Community.  Ubuntu has the most incredible community I’ve come across on the Internet.  Thousands upon thousands of people of different levels of Linux experience together to help people use their computers.  OpenSolaris is a great community that Sun has helped foster; using what they learned from this they need to set out and create a Desktop OpenSolaris community aimed at the everyday desktop user.

So how does Ian Murdock fit in?

Ian Murdock joined Sun on March 19th this year.  Ian founded the Debian Project and was the first DPL (Debian Project Leader), he’s been hired by Sun to help with Operating System Platform Strategy.  He’s already made it very clear that he wants to close the usability gap between Solaris and Linux, but also that he believes Linux needs to play an important role in what is to come.

Over the last week or so Project Indiana has been banded about quite a bit.  I don’t think anybody really knows quite what Indiana has in store for us just yet—I’ve certainly heard nothing more than I can read on the Internet, despite the fact I have access to SWAN.  It is entirely possible that Indiana has nothing at all to do with Ian Murdock, but the rumourmill has been set in motion, and an interesting little fact is that Murdock was born in the US state of Indiana…

What will Project Indiana be?  A better question might be ‘What do I want Project Indiana to be?’   I hope that Indiana will be the start of a big push for Solaris to hit the desktop.  I hope that Indiana can take over what the guys over at gnusolaris.org / Nexenta have begun:

A complete desktop operating system, based around the OpenSolaris kernel, a GNU userland and oodles of open source and third-party applications hosted in an easily accessible repository.

What if, given the fact that Sun endorse Ubuntu on their UltraSPARC T1 processors, Project Indiana became Ubuntu Indiana…

I borrowed an openSuSE 10.2 DVD from Anton and finally got around to giving it a whirl. Here are my thoughts about it:

• GRUB bootsplash and boot-up is very nice and swish; better than Ubuntu
• installer is way behind the Ubuntu equivalent; there is too much choice and potential to go wrong
• partition editor is a recipe for disaster; different disks aren’t clearly defined: it would be very easy for a newbie to nuke their disk by accident
• the install went smoothly and the overall presentation of the OS is good
• GNOME support is much improved over previous releases; it feels like less of an afterthought
• I ended up with a CD-only application repository thanks to not having an uplink at install time. YaST2 sucks monkey balls; this is a real shame considering how great it used to be. The options are ambiguous and it took me a good amount of time to find out how to add a new YUM repository
• What is YUM? What is ZEN? What is going on with the consistency in this operating system? There are two available tools to add/update repositories and whatnot. One of them crashed half-way through, and the other wanted me to insert a disc!
• YUM is very slow, apt/deb is far superior
• Installing nvidia drivers was more complicated than Ubuntu (I gave up)
• The GNOME slab is very nice, not because it is better, but because it is good that people are thinking about things
• Beagle (with the Firefox plugin) by default is good news for all
• I didn’t get the 3D desktop stuff working
• Nice to have some proprietary stuff included by default: Flash, etc.
• My webcam wasn’t recognised (Ubuntu manages it)

• Much improved integration between KDE and GNOME

  Overall I wasn’t impressed. Some things are definitely ahead of Ubuntu: the GRUB menu is one big thing that I think the Ubuntu guys need to concentrate on. It seems the Novell guys are spending more time with whiz-bang than they are on the fundamentals.

  Ubuntu, on the other hand, now have a very solid foundation and the next release (which won’t install on my machine right now (but it is an alpha)) should definitely help level things out.

  If you want desktop Linux: use Ubuntu.

The subject is a little misleading, but I couldn’t remember what the datacard that I’ve borrowed from Vlad is called.

I’m connecting to the Internet from home via a T-Mobile PCCard, which uses some fangled 3g technology to give me a 1.8Mbps Interweb connection.  Latency is a little higher than with conventional ‘broadband’, but the overall feel is good.

The big issue I have is with images… T-Mobile made a blanket decision to enable image compression by default.  This means that I get garbled crappy images which are a pain in the backside.

After a little reading about I discovered that you could use a force reload (Shift+Ctrl+R in Firefox) to get the full-res samples.  Yet more reading and I discovered that some people were setting a custom User Agent (appending “Blazer/4.0”) to fool the transparent proxy server into thinking the browser was incapable of page compression (although I don’t fully understand how this would help with inline JPEG compression, but anyway).  Unfortunately this neat little trick didn’t work to me.

This got me thinking… if I can use my browser to force the proxy to send me a full-res image then it must be doing something special.  A trip over to livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/, a new Firefox plugin and restart later and I was able to observe the HTTP headers that Firefox was sending to the server.

I quickly spotted that the following two extra headers were being sent on a force reload:

Pragma: no-cache

Cache-Control: no-cache

So it looked as though the Pragma and Cache-Control force the proxy to send me the real deal.  Now, time for another plugin, this time Modify Headers which I configured to be active at all times (“Always on”) and to send the exact two headers I mentioned in the last paragraph.

Modify Headers is a neat little plugin that allows the user to send any custom headers in a reasonably fine-grained way.  But for me, I wanted the headers active for all requests.

The result?  It was good… all of the pictures were now pretty.  Of course, this isn’t without its drawbacks… all requests bypass the cache, which means I’ll be pulling more data down, but in exchange for the good images I guess I don’t have much other choice.

I’ve not played around much yet, but I’m sure there will be other issues.  I’m a little curious as to how a regular page refresh is different to a forced page refresh… from what I’ve read there are a bunch of odd little things that go on, mostly historical.

But for now, I’m a happy bunny :)

I can’t remember whether I’ve talked about this before… but since installing Ubuntu Edgy Eft I’ve found that my laptop (a Sony Vaio X505/CP) can magically take advantage of all of the good ACPI stuff.  I can suspend to RAM and disk (hibernate) and have plenty of control over this.

Power management has long been a Windows strong point, but with this latest release it really starts to look as though Linux is catching up… but there is still a long way to go.

Once I realised that my laptop fully supported power management I began to look at my desktop machine.  I was very happy to discover that I could suspend and resume with no problem at all… but only the first time around.  Come the second suspend/resume attempt, the system failed to come back—a fairly useless feature.

Since then I’ve been investigating how to solve it, but I didn’t get very far.  I’ve spent the last few hours playing around with BIOS settings, running through countless fscks on my data disk and generally not getting very far… until I tried a hibernate.

Hibernate is a sleep 4 (unless suspend, which is a sleep 3).  In this mode the contents of the system RAM get flushed to disk, along with the state of the CPU registers.  The machine is then fully powered down and could be lugged off to the other side of the world to be powered back on.  Quite by fluke I discovered that this worked.  So far I’ve had a couple of hibernate/resume cycles without any problem.

Hibernate is a great solution for now, but in the long-term, it would be nice to gain working suspend support for all systems.

What better way to celebrate the release of Ubuntu Dapper Drake than by joining in the discussing in the Ubuntu Feisty Fawn forum.

Many thanks and congratulations to all those involved with Ubuntu.  It’s nice to be running an officially stable distro… if only for a couple of weeks before I decide I need to upgrade to Feisty!

For the most part I’ve been running Dapper Drake (the latest stable release) on both my laptop and desktop. All the while I’ve had a testing install of Edgy Eft, slated for release in October, running alongside. There are a number of big issues—Java applets cause Firefox to crash and there are some nasty font-rendering problems with Firefox. These will all be worked out come release time.

For the first time in about two weeks I’ve booted into Edgy and done a full upgrade. Wow. It feels fast. It boots incredibly quickly and the whole system feels more responsive. Firefox 2 (Bon Echo) is great too—the red-underlines for unknown words in text fields is an absolute must.

Obviously GNOME 2.16 is full of great new features, Evolution in particular. I really get the feeling that Edgy will be a great and fast release.

Congratulations and thanks to all of the GNOME and Ubuntu devs—great work!

I’ve been running Ubuntu Dapper Drake (the development release) for quite a while now… well, almost six months. Before that I was running Ubuntu Breezy Badger when it was the development release. So I’ve not had a reinstall of my main machine in almost a year… never a good thing when each day I was averaging between 60-120MB of “updates”.

Lately I’ve found that X has been locking up, the screensaver seems to cause my session to die, and so on. There are three possibilities here: 1) it’s a big nasty bug; 2) my GNOME user profile is boned; or 3) the install is dead.

The easiest thing to fix is the install… I’ve got a whole disk for /home so I simply reinstall Ubuntu Dapper Drake Flight 5 over my current install and then applied the latest updates. If the problem occurs again then I’ll create a new GNOME profile… this takes a bit more time and effort but still isn’t too much hassle. If it still occurs that probably means it’s a big nasty bug, that I’ll have to work on tracking down to get it fixed.

Still, I’m pretty happy with the runtime on my development desktop… it’s been more stable than the average “stable” Windows XP install, so that’s one thing ;)

I decided I wanted to give the latest Gaim CVS version a try so I installed all of the necessary Ubuntu development packages and created myself an Ubuntu package. This is from Friday October 21 at about 2am (GMT+1). It seems to work fairly well, although bits are obviously still missing due to the nature of a CVS build.

Feel free to try the package for yourself if you want to see what’s to come. You can install it under Ubuntu without much trouble by removing gaim-data and gaim (which will force ubuntu-desktop to be removed). Once you done that simply run:
sudo dpkg -i gaim_1:1.9.9+cvs20051021-1_i386.deb
followed by
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

Enjoy!

I’m sat in the “President room” at the main Vivi office in China right now… although I’m in a rather hot room (we can’t find the remote control for the air conditioner) for Internet access.

Vivi is Xiaoxiao’s father’s company that designs and manufactures electronic toilets—the kind people always seem to ask about when you bring up Japan. To be honest, I’m still undecided on the topic—some of the features are actually quite good and work well, while others are not so great. As I’ve explained to Xiaoxiao’s father; I think it is just a matter of getting accustomed to it.

I’ve spent a couple of hours working on translating the manual for the latest toilet and a few other bits and pieces. By translating I mean rewriting computer translations so they make some amount of sense. I don’t really like doing it (it gets boring fairly quickly) but I’m glad to as there is little else I can do—everywhere I go somebody pays for me, takes me places, etc. In fact, the only money I’ve spent has been on my camera, a bag and battery and food at McDonald’s (and then only because only Xiaoxiao came with me). I bought some toothpaste too, but I was on my own then.

I’ve got my laptop synchronised with CompSoc again, which is good, although I’ve still not yet copied any photos. I’ve not really taken any worth keeping yet. I’ve been bitten by the Nikon RAW encryption too—while dcraw itself is capable of working around (read: “cracking”) the encryption, it seems the gimp ufraw plugin (that uses dcraw) hasn’t yet been updated. I guess I’ll have to shoot fine JPEG for a little while—I guess it doesn’t matter too much while I’m still figuring things out anyway.

Here’s another tip—website mirrors are good, very good. The Ubuntu China mirror allows me to get around 150KB/s while the regular UK mirror Ubuntu found on install was giving me less than 5KB/s.