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:

Merry Christmas and VMWare 6

.. and all that. :)

Been chilling in Sweden for the last few days, had a terrible flight back with a 2 hour delay due to fog over south east england and then a very annoying crying baby on the plane.
We even had a distubance in the queue to the gate, some guy from the middle east was making a scene and started threatening a few other people for bumping in to him. I have to admit, I knew it wasn't a good idea to mess with airport security, but these guys where hard. The scene was quite funny, when they asked him to come with them and he started questioning them they said something in the lines of "Sir, you have 2 seconds to comply or we will remove you with force." We didn't seem him again after that.
Anyway, got socks and a few good CD's for Christmas. Always good with new music.
I installed VMWare Workstation 6 beta yesterday and had a play around with that. A word of warning, although it has some cool features and is meant to be a bit faster the beta version is a debug build and in classic vmware-style the debug builds are slow... really slow. Booting CentOS 4 takes at least 50% longer. The "freeze bug" when starting a VM in Vista is fixed though.

All jolly good fun!

Running Oracle Unbreakable Linux under VMWare

I finally got around to do a proper install of Unbreakable Linux today.
Pretty much as expect, it's pretty much identical to CentOS. It's got yum and all that.

Took the opertunity to try the new free version of VMWare GSX Server, or at least what used to be known as GSX. They just call it VMWare server now.
The VMware tgz install on my 64-bit Ubuntu 6.10 was quite smooth. You still have to enter a serial, easily obtained from filling out a simple form on the vmware website. The installation of vmware-authd failed though. Since Ubuntu's xinetd doesn't read /etc/inetd.conf I had to create an entry in /etc/xinet.d/.

hlinden@htpc:~$ cat /etc/xinetd.d/vmware
service vmware
{
        disable         = no
        socket_type     = stream
        protocol        = tcp
        user            = root
        wait            = no
        user            = root
        server          = /usr/sbin/vmware-authd
        port            = 902
}

Speed wise VMWare server is great, I only allocated 384Mb RAM to the VM and it still feels quite snappy and fast. I've only tried running two VM's at the same time so far. But my first impressions are simply, great stuff! The VM creation wizard thingy even had Solaris x86 in the list, haven't tried it yet but I sure will.

Took a few screenshots during the Unbreakable Linux installation.