Solaris Express on a Toshiba Satellite Pro A200

I bought myself one of those cheap laptops the other month. I needed a small machine for testing and since laptops are just as cheap (if not cheaper) as desktops these days I got a laptop.
The machine came with Vista but I wanted to triple boot Vista, Ubuntu and Solaris Express Community Edition.

• Use diskmgmt.msc in Vista to shrink the partition the machine came with, Windows can do this natively so there is no need to use Partition Magic or similar tools. Create at least three new partitions. One for Solaris, one for Linux and one for Linux swap.
  
• Secondly install Solaris, boot off the CD and go through the basic installer. The widescreen resolution worked out of the box (as usual). Do a full install, spending time "fixing" a smaller installer is just annoying. Solaris will install it's grub boot loader on both the MBR and superblock (on the Solaris partition). It probably makes sense to leave a large slice unused so it can be used with ZFS after the installation is done.
  
• Install Ubuntu. Nothing simpler than that.
  
• Edit Ubuntu's grub menu config (/boot/grub/menu.lst) to include Solaris. Simply point it to the Solaris parition (hd0,2 for me). Add these lines at the end of the file.
  

  title Solaris
  root (hd0,2)
  chainloader

Done!

I had to install the gani NIC driver in Solaris to get the Ethernet card working and the Open Sound System sound card driver to get sound working.
The Atheros WiFi card is supposed to be supported but I couldn't get it to work, even after adding the pci device alias to the driver. I'll post an update if I get it to work.

OpenSolaris SXDE upgrade time

It's been a while since I last played with Solaris Express Community Edition, so long that it actually changed names. There are now two versions, one for "random people" and one version for developers. SXCE is not released as often as SXDE but is more tested and stable, SXDE also comes with a lot more goodies, like Sun Studio 11 and Netbeans.
Anyway, the install of SXDE b63 under VMWare workstation 6 RC was as easy as ever.
However, at first boot I almost thought the VM was frozen for a minute or so, after grub it just sits there with a cursor in the corner of the screen for about 2 minutes before kicking off the kernel. All good after that though.
One thing I wanted to test was the new simplified resource capping in Solaris Zones. It was very straightforward and easy to use.
A couple of extra commands in zonecfg and the zone is capped to one core and 512Megs of memory. No more messing around with projects, except if you want really fine grained capping that is.
Cool!

Took a screenshoot:

PostgreSQL 8.2 hits beta

PostgreSQL 8.2 hit beta other day.
Just installed it in a Solaris zone on my laptop (you need a fairly recent Solaris Express release to use the a dtrace [pdf] functionallity).
A few new cool features.

• dtrace support in Solaris
  
• Warm standby server support
  
• CREATE INDEX without locking the table
  
• Improved syntax of the config file, support for SI units (kilobyte, megabyte, hour etc)
  
• Basic support for SQL 2003 analytical functions (I couldn't find any docs about this).
  
• Faster vacuuming
  
• Improved WAL and log management
  

Quite a lot of exciting stuff. Analytics could be fun and the speedups in WAL and logging could make a improvement for write intense operations, an area where postgres have been quite slowish in the past.

Full list and downloads here. Cool.

KDE - Not that krap after all

Ok, I've been quite "anti KDE" the last few years, with good reason imo. The last time I tried KDE must have been around 2001 or 20002 and back then it wasn't that good.
Now the other week my beloved OpenSolaris powered laptops hard drive failed on me. After I spend about a week moaning about it I finally got around to buying a new drive for it. Replace the old 30gb 4200rpm with a snappy 80gb 5400rpm drive (yes, the speed difference is really significant). Since I didn't have a recent Nevada build ready and was to lazy to download one I decided to install Kubuntu instead, got a free CD at an event the other day. Simple install as always with Ubuntu. Even the widescreen res on my laptop worked out of the box. Easy setup, did the usuall apt-get install oracle-xe, install postgres.
Then I realized I really lliked using KDE, things where so much easier than GNOME. KDE has probably got less features, but it just works. The integration between the applications is great, the little IM client Kopete is much nicer than gaim. KDE seems to use less memory than GNOME as well. Oh well, I saved disk space for Solaris and will probably install that as soon as I get around to downloading a recent version. Nevada B48 should be out any day now.