os2008.05#3: supporting “another” world and some more devices…
Overall insight of this day: If wanting to use OpenSolaris on a daily basis, I need more disk space; 12 GB isn’t just enough so far…
While generally being sufficient, as soon as something like VirtualBox comes into play, you start reaching certain boundaries… 😉 Though initially I thought about simply running VirtualBox making use of the disk images living in my Linux file system, I had to learn that even though there are ways to make OpenSolaris know the ext3 file system, one of them is read-only (thus not a real option here) and the other one, which is likely to be the “official” OpenSolaris ext2/3 driver one day, obviously requires a complete OpenSolaris development workspace set up and running in order to get built – an approach I have to postpone until I do have more storage dedicated to my installation. Locating a virtual machine on my external USB drive also is out, at the very least simply because of the disk image file size (try fitting 10 GB into FAT32…). In the moment I helped myself using a remote machine somewhere in our network (pkg install SUNWrdesktop) for starting and using the remote support software our company uses (which unfortunately is Windows-only). This is a minor annoyance however which is likely to be resolved by simply dedicating more disk space to OpenSolaris.
Asides this, I stumbled across two hardware related things today: One side, though being identified correctly using svn_91 kernel build, my audio controller (Intel ICH7) is not capable of generating any output, the mixer is disabled once and for all. Digging around I see people sharing the same problem yet still have to discover a solution to that. Reminds me of early Linux days trying to get the most exotic sound and multimedia hardware to work. Not that annoying, though, as at work I am not supposed to listen to music and/or require audio output devices, anyhow.
A little more annoying is that, shutting down the system from the terminal using halt, the system (a) doesn’t completely power off but shuts down, waiting them to manually be powered off, and (b – worse) this procedure sort of happens “invisibly” – at some point the X desktop just freezes but stays there, and the only way to tell whether or not the system has stopped yet is to manually monitor the hard drive activity lights and see whether or not there’s still something happening. Ideally, this does matter just once a day, but I couldn’t help noticing. 😉
That aside, so far still no difference whether working with Ubuntu or OpenSolaris. More or less starting to get used to the command line tools for doing process management that somehow differ to Linux (I am missing htop but prstat is at least next to it in the general idea…).
more days of this week: