Open Solaris

Today, Sun came down to our campus for hiring. As a Placement Committee volunteer, I got to talk to the officials who visited the campus.

Mr. Jo [;)] and I had some interesting talk about Sun, Open Solaris, ZFS, etc. I tried out OpenSolaris a long time back, from a live DVD (I was corrected on this, but that is not the point), it didn't boot. Sad.

Today, after this chat, I decided to give it a try again, with a new live CD in hand. This is OpenSolaris 2008.05.



Firstly, I loved the fact it detected all my hardware perfectly. My previous post contained a description of the horrors of having an Nvidia graphics subsystem, and getting a proper driver for it. Well, no problems here. It was detected and the application which corresponds to nvidia-settings package on Linux was shown. Check the screen shot, I love the "Solaris Nvidia" text. And a beautiful green background.


It has Firefox 2.0.0.14 (hmm, remember this is OpenSolaris 2008.05, the website says OpenSolaris 2008.11 has FF 3), sweet.

There is something called the Device Driver Utility (with a shortcut on the Desktop if you noticed).


The page at OpenSolaris.org says "Device Driver Utility provides information about the devices of your native system having OpenSolarisTM Operating System (OS) installed." The first thing you would notice is the "Driver Problems: 0" text on top. You also have a "Submit" button to report configurations to the OpenSolaris community.

A surprise was the inclusion of NmapFE in the applications that show up by default.


As I found out, detection of hardware doesn't imply you get audio/video without the necessary plugins. You still need to install those GStreamer plugins (or other alternatives).

Next up, the Package Manager.


Not very different from Ubuntu/Debian's Synaptic Package Manager, as far as looks go, except for the fact that the packages are more categorized as the left pane suggests. There is no manual page for apt, so probably OpenSolaris has a different way of handling applications.

It also has full-fledged compiz support. CompizConfigSettingsManager is present by default.



Visual Effects aren't turned on by default (Or OpenSolaris must think my computer wasn't good enough :( ). And Appearance Preferences has an extra option "Custom". I set my preference to "Extra" and I did not notice any slowdown.



It didn't auto mount my hard disk, and neither do I plan to right now.

There was no gcc(nor any C compiler) on the live CD. How stupid, I could not compile and run a "Hello World" in C. So I did it in python :P

jack@opensolaris:~$python HelloWorld.py
Hello, World!
jack@opensolaris:~$


So long!

NVIDIA on Linux

:X or :@ I'm angry with the bloody Nvidia drivers for Linux. Anyway, this post is supposed to be helpful, not a rant.

I upgraded from Ubuntu 8.04 to Ubuntu 8.10 when it came out. Then, I installed nvidia-kernel-2.6.26 which was my default nvidia stuff on Hardy and lo, my X crashed. It tried restarting some n times, with no success. So well, what was the problem. I still dunno. But the solution was to install the package nvidia-kernel-173.14.09 The last two numbers will vary, though. Lucky that I found this while random browsing on a friend's computer.

That did it.

A few weeks later, I wanted to use Debian, so, well, I removed Intrepid and installed Etch (Debian 40r5). This time, I upgraded, and installed nvidia-kernel-173. And guess what, it crashed again. I tried removing it and installing nvidia-kernel-2.6.26 which worked on Ubuntu 8.04. Well, it did not work this time. The solution? nvidia-kernel-2.6.26-1-openvz-amd64

I have absolutely no idea what is going on. But this worked. It installed an additional kernel though. I now boot into a kernel which is identified by Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.26-1-openvz-amd64

Hope this will remain a note for me in the future, for further X crashes.

Update: Well, this was helpful, but a better realization was this