Today I tried out the Solaris version of VirtualBox on my OpenSolaris 2008.05 laptop.

My laptop is a Sony VAIO, a Centrino Pro processor based system. The first decision you need to make is whether you need to download the 32 bit or the 64 bit version. They recommend using the command isainfo -k in a terminal window to see which mode Solaris is running in. Solaris has a single distribution for both 32 bit and 64-bit capable CPUs, and at runtime, it picks the best mode. Since my system supports EM64T (extended memory 64 technology), OpenSolaris is running in 64 bit mode, so I downloaded that one.

After the download and untar, the instructions for installing the package are quite straightforward.

One small criticism is that you need to launch VirtualBox from the command line; it should install something in the Gnome desktop menus.

Once I launched VirtualBox, I was able to define a new Windows guest, give it around 1GB of memory (I am running with 2GB on the laptop), point the CD-ROM at the .iso file of Windows XP, and boot away. The install went flawlessly, and I was able to bring up Windows XP just fine. Also installing the Windows Guest extensions worked fine as well.

Networking and audio came through from Windows into Solaris, and since audio works in OpenSolaris, I was able to hear the Windows sounds just fine. Note that if you turn on seamless mode, you might not want to reboot your guest, as the display will be... um... interesting. Though this seems to happen with Windows as the host as well.

Of the two configurations I have tried (running OpenSolaris as a guest under Windows or running Windows as a guest under OpenSolaris), I actually think I prefer this one.

• I could probably live my whole life in OpenSolaris and just use windows for those few times I just can't get away from it (like running my company expense reporting tool).
• Compiz, the 3D graphical desktop under Gnome is a lot cooler than the effects on Windows.
• I still need to figure out how to get my Windows guest to drill through the company firewall to set up a VPN connection, but I might have a website which explains how to do this.
• My 3945 wireless connection on OpenSolaris doesn't seem to want to stay as stable as the Windows wireless networking. Perhaps need an upgrade to 4965!

Since it's about 700MB, you can use a relatively cheap - almost free - 1GB USB stick or thumb drive to show somebody how wonderful OpenSolaris is.

I happened to come by a couple of USB sticks and decided to load up 2008.05 on them so they could be carried to a variety of machines and check out how 2008.05 works on them.

I had a little fun trying various tips from the web. Ashok sent me a link to James Liu's blog, and I tried this procedure. It seems to work, and I liked it because it unpacks the steps and let me see what is going on under the covers. One caveat with James' procedure: one of the steps that copies files onto the stick throws a few errors[1].

For a more automated method, try out this one from Dave Miner:

This works like a champ, though to be clear, there is one correction (which I found by reading the scripts):

# ./usbgen <path_to_iso_file> <path_to_usb_image> `pwd` <tmpdir>

This one seems to have gotten messed up in the HTML, or the usbgen script has changed. There are only 3 arguments to usbgen now. I would recommend specifying absolute pathnames for all three arguments, which you can do by prefacing the file names with the `pwd` method.

# ./usbcopy <path_to_usb_image>

Again, an absolute pathname works best here.

Anyway, this method seems to work well, and has very few manual steps. In fact, once you do the "usbgen" step, you can use usbcopy to create multiple sticks from that image. Nice!

The downside with this method is that you need to have the Mercurial tools installed (to do the "hg" command). Fortunately, I had a machine sitting around with all of this infrastructure set up and working.  I suppose the other downside is that you need to run this from a Solaris or OpenSolaris machine, rather than from Windows.

[1] In the James Liu method, almost at the end, you run the following command:
# cp -rP@ .??* * /mnt/usbdrive

I got the following errors thrown from the cp command:

bin: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
boot/solaris/bin/root_archive: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/nvidia0: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/nvidia1: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/nvidia2: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/nvidia3: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/nvidia4: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/nvidia5: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/nvidia6: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/nvidia7: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/nvidiactl: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/stderr: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/stdin: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/stdout: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory

I'm not sure if these are fatal or not.

I was running VirtualBox 1.5 for some months, and it is a great way for me to run OpenSolaris on my Windows laptop(or run Windows on my OpenSolaris desktop for that matter). Great functionality and performance.

They just recently released VirtualBox 1.6, and they added the "Guest Additions" feature support for Solaris and OpenSolaris. This means I can do things like Windows integration, which allows me to view guest windows in the host OS. (ie, an OpenSolaris window just looks and acts like a Windows window). This is really cool beans, and it installs great and works great!

The only missing feature in the Solaris Guest Additions is the Shared Folders between OpenSolaris and Windows. This is supposed to be fixed in the next release, which I think is in about a quarter.

The one criticism I have about Guest Additions: to install these in the guest required a bunch of searching around on my part before I finally located it. (It turns out that when you install VirtualBox, the guest additions .iso file is present along with the VirtualBox .exe, which in Windows is in Program Files.) Just read the user manual, it has the goods there, but was just hard for me to find with a quick scan, it took some effort to find it.

In some competing proprietary VM software, adding the guest additions is quite simple, I think you just click a button. And if you don't have the guest additions installed, you get a little nag on your screen when you start up guests which have not been so enhanced. This would be a good improvement for VirtualBox.

Good job Innotek!! I like these bits.

Cinco de Mayo (May 5, 2008) Sun launched their OpenSolaris 2008.05 distro of the OpenSolaris code. The venue for the launch was CommunityOne, a free one-day conference held on the Monday before JavaOne. Above is a snap of Rich Green who runs software at Sun, doing the launch.

This is the second year that Sun offered CommunityOne for free to whomever would pre-register for the event. It was a good value, since it included lunch, sessions on topics from Linux to Glassfish to MySQL. All attendees got an OpenSolaris 2008.05 LiveCD and a chance to rub shoulders with others interested in their particular field. Ian Murdock set the stage initially in a keynote that explained Sun's role as an aggregater and supporter of various open source technologies into something people can build their businesses on. Ian's presentation slides were art drawings with no words.

Then there was a panel discussion consisting of a broad spectrum of open source luminaries from the Linux Foundation (Jim Zemlin), Red Hat, MySQL, Google and Sun. Actually I think it takes a lot of courage on Sun's part to have a forum discussion like this at their event.

Then Rich Green came on stage to talk about OpenSolaris and its many sources of contribution and features. One really fun demo was a system set up with a series of USB disks in a ZFS pool running raidz. A GUI showed all of the disks reading away, and then Jim Hughes (Sun Fellow) took a sledgehammer to one of the drives. Demo GUI showed the system continuing to run with the drive lost.

The Jeff Bonwick, the lead on ZFS destroyed another drive with a power drill. Finally, two new USB drives were added and the GUI showed the writes flowing on to the new disks to rebuild the RAID configuration.

Steven Hahn showed a "cooking show" demo of installing from the LiveCD and installing from repositories. It was a good set of demos and speeches.

During the conference itself, Intel offered a couple of talks. I gave a general talk on OpenSolaris support on Xeon and Intel's Geeta Krishna talked about wireless support in OpenSolaris and encouraged people to contribute.

Later that night, there was an OpenSolaris launch party at a local sports pub. There might have been more than a little silliness - Here is Jim Hughes sporting an OpenSolaris temporary tattoo and a MySQL dolphin.

After that, JavaOne was actually a blur of keynote prep and giving booth talks. But I did enjoy a particular booth in the trade show floor which featured an oxygen bar. Guess it's a good alternative to breathing those heady fumes of the open source world!

OK, I am a little slow in the uptake here. And I am not in any way shape or form an expert on trademarks and brand management.

That said, I thought the orange and blue opensolaris.org logo would go away completely when the new bubble logo appeared. I was mourning the loss of the distinctive and eye-catching orange (something Tamarah Rockwood mentioned to me as well), and was grumpy about the bubbles in general. I thought the bubbles looked a little like what they show in comic strips when someone is drunk or hung over.

Now I see that opensolaris.org is keeping the old logo for the .org project site, and the new logo/colors are for the binary distro.

Hey, that’s pretty smart …

• It makes a distinction between the community using the distro vs the community contributing to the development.

• When the bubbles are animated (like they were in the CommunityOne keynote) they look really cool

• Of course, the bubble device itself is easier to fit on a button.

• My old orangey swag doesn’t look all old and out-of-date any more.

So now we have distinct appearances for the core development, for Solaris and for OpenSolaris. Add the appearances of the other distros, and life makes sense.

OK, so I told you I’m slow on the uptake, but this represents a turnaround in my thinking. Kudos to whomever had the gumption to punch this one through a certain amount of community grumpiness – it’s a win, 

Now the community needs to get its act together and agree on a mascot, ala tux.

Dave Sekowski: We recently announcement with Sun Microsystems that we have made TBB available on Sun Solaris* using Sun Studio* compilers. What exactly went into the patches we made to TBB?
Chris Huson: One set of changes was the addition of using statements in the test system, to accommodate slight differences in the header files; most of these were incorporated as-is after some discussion. Sun also disabled the "warning is error" switch in the build. We use it to be pedantic about the code, but the Sun compiler found different things to warn about. A change disabling the switch for Sun was put into mainline. The other major change was to add SunOS to the preprocessor statements which were for Linux.

Dave Sekowski: In porting TBB to Sun Solaris with Sun Studio what needed to be changed and why?
Chris Huson: The change needing review on the Sun side was support for the stricter Sun support for standard library functions. Some of these functions are in the global namespace on some platforms, and in the std:: namespace on others (including Sun). Vladimir Polin incorporated Sun's modifications in a way that also supported older platforms, and Sun reviewed and approved those changes.

Dave Sekowski: Can you tell me a little about building it with Sun Studio compilers and working it into our regular build, test and release flow?
Chris Huson: The process was virtually identical to the Linux build, especially after we started using the Sun Studio Express compiler. The system is now being incorporated into our nightly build and test system, with no major problems so far.

Dave Sekowski: Do you have any additional comments on how it went?
Chris Huson: The changes were small, and incorporating them into the current version of TBB was pretty painless.

Dave Sekowski: Finally, what did you think about the collaboration with Sun to make this port happen?
Chris Huson: The Sun developers did a great job in porting TBB to their platform. Because they adhered to the spirit of the design of TBB, incorporating those changes was an easy job.

First, ...2014?  I'd love to know what is going to be happening by the end of this year, let alone six years out.   That's an Internet Eternity, especially in this product area.  How old is  your cellphone, smartphone, or favorite tech toy? Would you have really envisioned how you use it two years ago?  Four?

Second, there are too many wild cards in the cast of characters.  Apple, Google, Asus, Microsoft, and even... what's their name again... oh yeah, Intel, might have a plan or two up their sleeve in this time frame, and any one of them could send things scrambling in a new direction.  Apple wrenched the phone world sideways with the iPhone, and Asus launched a whole new market with the Eee PC.  Google has Android cooking and never fails to keep developers amused with new forays, and good ol' Microsoft may be sometimes slow to the party, but they always show up with an entourage.

Third, the article claims the "proven advantages of the ARM ecosystem in mobile devices will eventually outweigh those of the Intel platform."  I've talked to a lot of people inside and outside Intel who develop for these devices, and the fragmentation of the existing ecosystems drives many of them nuts.   One of the great things about moblin is that is provides an compliance base across devices so you can reduce testing and reach more target systems, even running on multiple form factors like MIDs and netbooks.

ARM has an impressive part of the market right now in MID and ultra mobile devices without a doubt.  The iPhone alone tips the balance quite nicely.  I just don't see how anyone watching this industry, and who has looked at Atom and Intel's plans for it, could do anything but chuckle at any six-year prediction around MIDs other than it is going to be one crazy ride.

• Day 2 of the Summit started with a panel discussion on Advocacy, which I was invited to help kick off. Advocacy is an interesting Community, because it includes the worldwide user group effort as well as evangelism for OpenSolaris. I praised the Advocacy efforts of Sun and others, relating how difficult it is to create a robust, self-sustaining community when you start out with software that was mostly developed "inside the walls" and then freed.
• Unlike more traditional panels, it was designed by the moderator, Jim Grisansio to be a "fish bowl". There was always an empty chair, as an invitation for someone in the audience to join the panel, and someone would then escape to the audience.

The rest of the day was a series of breakout sessions. Here are some random thoughts in no particular order:

• I sat in on a Documentation discussion. I mentioned that I often hear the need for documentation which helps people move from Solaris/SPARC to Solaris/Xeon, including porting apps, differences to expect, etc. I was told that there is an existing document on this, but it's a few years old. Sun is apparently working on updating it to Solaris 10. I also said that Intel might be able to contribute to this as well.

  (Of course, I come from an era when we used to say, "why do you need documentation? Just read the source!". But I degress).

• There was a fantastic session on Desktop advances, and the plans going into the next year's advances. In particular, when they talked about advances to NWAM (Network Automagic, the GUI which gets you onto a wireless network), there was a mockup of a connection management UI. I noted that there is a Linux project called "conman" (love the name) which might offer some collaboration here. (Another AR for Dave...). They were also showing how good compiz looked. I love it and use it on my VAIO.
• The session I recommended we add to the conference was on moving the SCM (source code management) system for the operating system outside the firewall. Most of the prepared remarks were on the process which will be used with Mercurial, and which pieces still need to be developed.
• I missed the session on the ARC... I thought it would be good to take off because a member of my team wasn't feeling too good and I wanted to get him to his hotel in San Jose.

Of course, the best thing about a Summit like this are the connections between people before and after the organized sessions. (And, sometimes during the sessions!)

I loved the live IRC chat which was projected on the wall during the sessions. This helped encourage live feedback from the room and people around the world watching the video screen.

The level of organization was better in my opinion than the last summit, though there was not as much of an ad-hoc feel.

Some people outside of Sun said they very much appreciated having Sun management there in the room listening to them. This should create all kinds of good will in the community.

I did hear a suggestion that we add a code sprint element to the event, which would get developers together to create code live in needed areas.

All in all, I thought it was a highly valuable event. I really appreciate Sun for creating and funding this event. It was a great way to get the community lined up for support.

Intel on OpenSolaris - 08D01586.0
Title: Dave Stewart of Intel
Description: An interview with Dave Stewart, head of Team Open Solaris
at Intel, about Intel's involvement in and contributions to Open Solaris.
File Name: 08D01586_00.mp3
I did this interview over the phone, and had never met Barton before, but I met him just last night at CommunityOne. It was fun putting a face to the name.

(But he thought my team name sounded like a soccer team...)