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by 0 comments on "Installing OpenSolaris on machines with just about enough RAM"

I wanted to install OpenSolaris 2008.11 in a machine that had 512 MB RAM which is just about enough to install and use OpenSolaris. But to my misfortune, GNOME Desktop environment took too long to load from the LiveCD and the system hung up every time I tried starting the installation. I was irritated and wanted to try the Text mode provided in the LiveCD and wanted to see if OpenSolaris has a text-based or ncurses-based installation available but to my misfortune, it left me at a login shell beyond which nothing happened. On googling, I found out that OpenSolaris doesn’t yet have a text-based installer and there were a few workarounds that were given like ssh X forwarding which was Greek and Latin to me and I couldn’t do it either.

So I decided to post this issue to BOSUG and immediately Moinak Ghosh, the man tirelessly and enthusiastically working for Belenix replied by telling me how to start the installation without loading the GNOME stuff at all and it worked perfectly. Here are the steps.

1. Boot into Text mode in the Live CD.
2. Login as user ‘jack’ in the login prompt that appears. (password is jack)
3. See if there is a .xinitrc file in the home directory. If there is, delete it.
4. Type the command ‘xinit’ and it will start X with a terminal.
5. Click on the terminal and type the command ‘pfexec /usr/bin/gui-install’ and the installer will start fine.

Thanks to Moinak and BOSUG for letting me know about such a way to install OpenSolaris on machines with just about enough RAM. With this, I was able to install OpenSolaris 2008.11 on a lot of machines.

by 3 comments on "Hell with whoever and whatever"

I have been going through an emotionally turbulent period of time where there are wild swings in emotions. One of the main things causing all this misery is the feeling of being used by someone so mercilessly with a precision a surgeon might envy with his surgical tools. It became obviously clear where my position is among the people whom I live amidst.

People have the tendency to be selfish and self-centered. But when it goes to this bad an extent, I can only rant in helplessness. But the feeling of being used, kills all the sanity inside me.

I have been in worse situations and this seems to top all those and itself every day that I can only gasp for breath.

In these testing times, it is only my fault that I got myself into a big big mess with my schedule, academics and the most important health – mind you I am a diabetic for the past 3 years. And my health is going nowhere but to shatters.

Distressing times such as this, make me think a lot of drastic things like thinking about breaking out of all the shackles and the commitments and living a stress-free life that I want to live. Another thought in me thinks that I should pay back the people causing me this misery in the same coin. But alas, sanity butts in and prevents me from degrading to such cheap levels of behavior.

I am just waiting with “This will change” in my breath and guarded optimism which is helping me survive in this merciless one-heck of a world!

by 0 comments on "OpenSolaris 2008.11 – A step in the right direction, but beware of impending pitfalls!"

guruprasad@opensolaris-2008.05$ BUILD =`uname -v | sed -e “s/snv //” -e “s/[a-z]//”`

guruprasad@opensolaris-2008.05$ pfexec pkg refresh

guruprasad@opensolaris-2008.05$ pfexec install entire@0.5.11-0.${BUILD}

guruprasad@opensolaris-2008.05$ pfexec install SUNWipkg@0.5.11-0.${BUILD}

guruprasad@opensolaris-2008.05$ pfexec pkg install SUNWinstall-libs

guruprasad@opensolaris-2008.05$ pfexec pkg image-update

This is how we can upgrade from OpenSolaris 2008.05 to OpenSolaris 2008.11 – so says the official OpenSolaris site. Since the release of 2008.11, I have been wanting to install it on my notebook and start using it, but I didn’t have much time to do it. At last, today I decided to do the upgrade and not a fresh install because I would have to install all the software packages again.

All the above commands worked fine and pkg image-update showed that it had to download some 1300 odd MB for the upgrade and the upgrade started. After a couple of hours, when the upgrade was almost over at about 99%, the upgrade failed as the disk was full. 🙁 . So I, tried to free some space and proceed with the upgrade. But then I realized that even after freeing some space, I will have more or less no space left. As if to endorse my thought, the OS promptly froze and hung. So I decided to overwrite the existing installation with the brand new 2008.11 release.After burning the 2008.11 iso onto a CD, I booted into the Live Session and started the installation which was so simple. When the installation was happening, I wanted to try out some things.

My Intel PRO Wireless 3945 ABG adapter worked out of the box as in 2008.05 and it in fact got connected to the available wireless network in a flash without any problems unlike in the previous version where I had some issues with nwamd. I was happy about this and the Gnome Panel applet for the interfaces was nice.And the next surprise was Firefox and there was the latest Firefox 3.0.4 which is a great thing compared to 2008.05 which had 2.0.0.12 if I remember right. And of course as usual drivers for my Nvidia GeForce 8600 M GS card was installed and Compiz-fusion worked out of the box.

I then ran the Device Driver utility and the Audio driver and the ACPI driver which were missing in the previous release were there and working fine and this meant that I had zero driver issues which is really really great.

Also in the previous release the Package Manager was so weak and feeble that it got grayed out every few seconds and it was impossible to use it at all. But this time the package manager works great.

So next, I wanted to install softwares and promptly installed amp-dev, sunstudio,HPC tools and etc. When I wanted to install the divine VLC player, my thoughts immediately turned to LifeWithSolaris repository. But when I added the repository and tried to install softwares I got errors. So I visited that site and found out the IPS repository has temporarily been disabled due to some copyright and licensing issues. I felt like a balloon pricked by a needle and was utterly disappointed. I then added the Blastwave Repository and refreshed the package list and had a lot of my favorite packages showing up in the package list. But unfortunately, when I tried to install any package from Blastwave, all I repeatedly got was HTTP 405 error, probably due to a problem with repository. I really felt dejected and what lifted my spirit was the presence of my favorite Emacs Editor(a lot lot more than an Editor too!), which was missing in the official IPS repository of 2008.05, in the official IPS repository and immediately I installed it.

In the war of editors, my loyalty is definitely to Emacs, which is one of the finest piece of software ever written. So to be able to install Emacs and use it in penSolaris was really really satisfying. I hate having to use GEdit! Then I tried to build VLC from source and gave up some distance into it. When a BeOS and Syllable have their pre-built VLC binaries, it is a pity that we still have to build VLC from source on OpenSolaris. LifeWithSolaris was a respite but it didn’t last too long. 🙁

And one more thing that took the sheen off, was the highly limited nature of the repository and the inability to easily save, reuse and redistribute the packages we download and install. GNU/Linux distros are light years better in this aspect. This is the reason which makes me favor a Ubuntu or a Debian as my primary OS and not OpenSolaris. With further development and a larger community participation over a period of time, this situation may change and we may have great, universal repositories. This must compulsorily happen or else OpenSolaris can never come out of Solaris shadow and grow,spread. It will end up into Solaris stream soon. So I sincerely hope and pray for great progress in OpenSolaris so that it escapes the mentioned ignominy. Issues with multimedia and codecs and a limited repository is the biggest obstacle to OpenSolaris in entering the Desktop environment and growing further. Any normal user will not use a OpenSolaris for DTrace or ZFS when he cannot listen to songs and watch movies in OpenSolaris.

I sincerely hope that people in-charge of OpenSolaris hear this and act accordingly to make OpenSolaris a lot lot better.

Thats it for now, Ciao. 🙂

by 0 comments on "Sun Club – A session after a long time"

The Sun Club sessions that had been planned had to be put into hibernation for about two months as there were exams during that period.So the first thing I did after the college opened for a new semester was to plan for a session and organize it. I wanted to have a session introducing people to OSUM, Sun Academic Initiative (SAI), Certifications and of course, Code for Freedom contest.

So on 3rd December, we had a two-hour session at our college auditorium with a 250-odd audience. I talked about OSUM, SAI and the Code for Freedom contest. My friends – Anugraha, Jayalakshmi, Venkatachalam and Karthik talked on NetBeans IDE, Sun Studio and OpenSolaris in connection with the Code for Freedom contest.

We distributed the CDs and DVDs of NetBeans and OpenSolaris to the audience so that they can try them out and use it. A demo of the OSUM site and its featureset was shown and the benefits students wil get out of being a part of OSUM was emphasised. With my college being a slow starter in the OSUM member count, things can only get better from hereon.

I will post the photos taken during the session on my Picasa album soon – http://picasaweb.google.com/lgp171188

We have planned to conduct more demos, hands-on sessions and contests in the near future. I am very happy to be a part of this Free Open Source Software movement and I am trying my best to help it. 🙂

by 0 comments on "So far as a Campus Ambassador"

Its almost 3 months into my term as the Sun Campus Ambassador of my college. Though i have great plans, i could not put much into implementation due to a lot of issues I had to face. After I returned to my college after Induction training at Bangalore, about 10 working days were lost as we had an unexpected holiday during the last week of August. This caused a cramped and tight schedule for the remaining time and everyone was very busy. With the last working day scheduled at the end of third week of September, I virtually had about a month’s time to do some useful activities. I was unable to arrange sessions as the college closed after the last working day. In the available time, I couldn’t schedule much of events as I couldn’t catch even a few of the busy people in my college. 🙁

Still I was able to do some useful things. I had an informal meet with the Sun club members and had a long discussion on what kind of activities we can have in the year. I also conducted a small-scale intro session with not much people on September 3,2008 – the day of Ganesh Chathurthi. During that session, I talked about the CA program, SAI, proposed activities of the Sun club and how students could benefit. I also introduced various Sun technologies. Jayalakshmi, my friend and classmate, gave a short talk on “Free Open Source Software” and Anugraha handled a NetBeans intro/demo session. Then myself and G.R. Karthik introduced the audience to OpenSolaris.

To keep the audience involved and cheered up, we screened the legendary “Big Buck Bunny” movie and had them in splits. We also had a demo of Compiz fusion on OpenSolaris and had a few dropping jaws 🙂

In another session, I planned for a small install-fest of Free Open Source Software OSes – OpenSolaris 2008.05, Ubuntu Hardy Heron, Fedora 9 and Debian etch. We had a reasonable turnout and I happily demoed the installation on bare metal and also on Virtual Box. I enrolled a lot of people on the Sun club mailing list during this meet. The audience were clearly impressed and wanted to have more such sessions.

My biggest achievement till now is conducting the Software Freedom Day celebrations for the fifth consecutive year at my college. More about it on another post on this blog http://blogs.sun.com/guruprasad/entry/software_freedom_day_tce_for.

With the Code for Freedom contest for this year announced, I am all geared uo to participate in it and do a good contribution. Of course, my role as a campus ambassador would be to introduce a lot of people to this great contest and motivate, help them participate.

So, as soon as my college reopens on November 17, 2008 (My birthday :-)) for the next semester, I intend to go full throttle with my activities and do a great job as a CA. I have planned to hold full-day sessions that will be enlightening to the audience and give OSUM a big kick to get it up and running. I want people to know about SAI and make use of it to get certified. There are great dreams and I want to make them a reality. Looking ahead for the great time ahead! 🙂

My Picasa Web Album is at http://picasaweb.google.com/lgp171188

by 0 comments on "Rats and Meow on OpenSolaris"

I was having issues connecting to online repositories of Ubuntu and OpenSolaris as I was connect to a network which was behind a proxy server. Thanks to Avinash Joshi http://blogs.sun.com/avinashjoshi/entry/using_apt_get_behind_a I was able to setup apt on Ubuntu to contact and install packages from the Ubuntu repository from behind the proxy. I was trying to find a similar solution to OpenSolaris too when Ashwin Bhatt, the highly helpful and active Tech-lead, helped me with the idea that a simple export of a ‘http_proxy’ variable with the proxy server and port values i it would do the trick. It indeed worked for me and I could install all the essential things on my OpenSolaris installation. So I downloaded and installed VLC player from Life with Solaris IPS repository.

I had installed audio drivers on OpenSolaris (courtesy Ashwin Bhatt). So when I installed VLC player, AMP stack and stuff, there was no need for me anymore to use M$ Windoze anymore as I have cool Ubuntu Hardy Heron and OpenSolaris 2008.05!

I had brought ‘Jaane to ya jaane na’ (a long time due), on my usb stick from my friend. And it became my first movie on OpenSolaris. 🙂

Movies are basically for 3 hours of total entertainment even though there might be gaping holes in the logic, and JTYJN was one such movie. It is a good enough debut for Imran Khan who manages to look handsome and the gorgeous Genelia D’Souza continuing her mannerisms from ‘Bommarilu’ and ‘Santhosh Subramaniam’. I was really happy watching the movie on OpenSolaris and my friends, most of whom where thinking OpenSolaris was for geeks and it must be so complex and user-unfriendly were left dumbfounded.

Why ‘Rats and Meow’ in the title? The nicknames with which Imran Khan and Genelia call each other in the movies are Miaow (Genelia) and Rats(Imran Khan)! For more details watch the movie itself.

P.S. Imran and Genelia seem to have a nice chemistry and this post is not much about the movie JTYJN 🙂

OpenSolaris can do anything any other OS can do and can do much more….

by 0 comments on "Software Freedom Day @ TCE for the fifth consecutive year! FStival 08"

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Ever since SFI started celebrating Software Freedom day every year in 2004, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, has been celebrating it as FStival (Free Software festival). This is the fifth straight year that FStival has been conducted in our college, which is a Free Software hub in southern Tamil Nadu.

As a part of FStival, we organize demo stalls on various Free Software tools and people from various walks of life from in and around Madurai visit and get benefited. This year we had demo stalls on:

  1. Free Software philosophy

  2. Emacs

  3. Vi

  4. LaTeX

  5. OpenOffice

  6. MySQL

  7. OpenSolaris

  8. PostgreSQL

  9. LAMP web stack

  10. LAPP web stack

  11. Drupal and Mambo

  12. GIMP

  13. Blender

  14. GTK Glade

  15. Live Distros

  16. GCC

  17. Debuggers

  18. Subversion and Trac

  19. Compiz-fusion

  20. Multimedia and Games

  21. Ubuntu installation

  22. Bluefish editor

  23. Distro burning

  24. TCENet portal

  25. *nix commands

  26. Linux day to day

  27. Internet tools

I conducted a stall on OpenSolaris and handled a couple of installation sessions of Ubuntu Linux. My friends S.Anugraha, G.R. Karthik and Venkatachalam helped me a lot. A million thanks to them.

We had Mr. Kamesh Jayachandran from CollabNet who works on Subversion. He is the first Indian full committer to the subversion code base. He played a great role in the development of the ‘Merge tracking’ feature included in the latest Subversion 1.5. We also had the esteemed presence of Mr. Joe Steeve, an alumnus of the college and a passionate free software enthusiast. He is the founder of Free Software clubs in the college. Both these distinguished guests enlightened a packed auditorium on Free software and Subversion. Mr. Kamesh Jayachandran inspired us by telling us about his growth in the Free Software industry.

There were about 400 visitors from various walks of life including students from various academic institutions in and around Madurai. They were very much impressed by what they saw and learnt a lot so that they can create an awareness about Free software in their places.

The surprise guest who visited FStival 08 was Dr. Sivathanu Pillai, Chief Controller of DRDO, who was very much impressed with FStival 08 and had words of praise and encouragement for us.

We also played throughout the day, a video of Richard M Stallman, the man who started it all, talking about Software Freedom. That enigmatic and inspirational video would have surely converted many into Free Software users.

FStival 08 was a grand success and left the visitors, participants and organizers craving for more of it and looking forward to the next FStival.

The complete set of snaps from FStival 08 is available at http://fstival.tce.edu/fast_gallery/2008/

by 0 comments on "My Sun blog"

I, as the Sun Microsystems Campus Ambassador of my college, have been given the privilege to have my blog on blogs.sun.com and a Sun email id! I am feeling really overjoyed at it.

My Sun blog is at http://blogs dot sun dot com/guruprasad. I will be blogging in parallel in both the blogs and will try my best to keep both of them in sync.

by 0 comments on "Third Year at College"

My third year at college started today. We had a new classroom, new subjects and staff, of course the same classmates! I am very much looking forward to an activity-filled year ahead. I would very much like to learn loads of stuff and of course become a better guy.

This year is very important because I will have to face campus placement interviews at the end of this year. So its high time to get myself to equipped for that. I love challenges. 🙂