We’ve published three of the approximately-six-monthly distribution releases now, and we’re starting to refine pkg(5)’s capabilities to handle automatically an ever larger set of configuration scenarios. (Read: "edge cases".) Bart implemented actuators in 2008.11, and that let us handle any resource that could be configured or reconfigured via an smf(5) service instance. In future releases, [...]
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Observations from a West Coast family
File: Product
It’s been a busy few months, but things are clearing up now. The past few weeks, I’ve been using an Acer Aspire One for coverage when my trusty Toshiba r500 is recharging. It’s my computer for meetings, I suppose. The Aspire One is a great little netbook, and 2009.06 should recognize every device on the [...]
There’s a lot of new applications in 2008.11—cheese is useful for testing your USB webcam and making self-portraits for avatars and profile pictures and I’m very intrigued by gobby—but I already have my favourite: terminator. Here’s a scaled screenshot: I used to use ion as my window manager, so getting some tiling back is great. [...]
I regularly use my for presentations and demonstrations, which in the past has involved some configuration gymnastics. If your laptop has NVIDIA graphics, the “NVIDIA X Server Settings” Preferences panel lets you configure for most projectors, but if you didn’t have an NVIDIA graphics adaptor, configuration was arduous and fragile. With 2008.11, we get GNOME [...]
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As I did for 2008.05, I’ll collect links to mirror sites here. These will also get links on the various download pages out there. Construction of 2008.11 was faster, more efficient, and generally more predictable than 2008.05. Image packaging, snap upgrade, and the distribution constructor—and the notorious distro importer—saw many fixes and features that resulted [...]
Randy has been blogging on the suspend-resume feature and how it’s been improving on a variety of x86-based systems. A few weeks ago, I was sitting on the USGS Menlo Park campus, and decided to record a demonstration of my own laptop being suspended and resumed multiple times: (You can also access the video on [...]
Well, I don’t know exactly who’s running a copy of 2008.05, but I do know what IP addresses have interacted with pkg.opensolaris.org from the server logs. I used MaxMind’s GeoIP Lite to map these back to countries, and Google’s chart API to make a little map: If 2008.05 is your first experience with the technology [...]
As I did for the preview releases, I’ll collect links to mirror sites here. These will also get links on the various download pages out there. Bart and I just finished updating the package repository with the new packages we’d received the past few weeks, and that means 2008.05 is out the door. (Thanks to [...]
We’re talking about OpenSolaris 2008.05 over on IRC, using the #os200805, from now until 2 p.m. Pacific Time. If you haven’t got an IRC client, you can use freenode’s Java applet, which worked great (until Danek kickbanned me). Enter a nickname, and then ask some questions. Apparently the load from 60 000 users blew out [...]
As part of the changes to get Developer Preview 2 ready, we decided to rejigger the HTTP handling on pkg.opensolaris.org so that we could have more options as more people attempt to use the early versions of image packaging. Previously, we ran pkg.depotd directly on port 80, in its read-only mode; now we use Apache [...]
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