Desktop Effect

I do not see any reason why I should not enable the desktop effect ! Sweet !
To enable it , just got to "System" => "Preferences => "Appearance" and select the "Visual Effects" tab.

Device Driver Utility

I decided to pull off my newly installed OpenSolaris hard disk into a more power machine (slightly - A Pentium 4 machine with 3 Ghz CPU and 1 GB of memory).
Well , expected the OpenSolaris booted up and running but it cannot detect the network card.

No worry , go to Application => System Tools and run the "Device Driver Utility". Right click on the network card and select "View Details" and it will show quite a lot of information but what I am really interested is the URL where I can download and install the network card driver (I guess I am lucky when the myk driver version 2.6.3 just release recently).


The URL link is : http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng/ which is the website for free NIC drivers for Solaris. I hope this driver will be able to make it to the OpenSolaris package repositories or perhap it is already in there ?

I just download it and do the usual : make and make install but make sure you have a working C compiler installed. I am using the OpenSolaris package manager to install the Sun Studio Express (around ~200 MB) but i guess you can also use the GCC compiler.

It is all documented in the "Readme.txt".

(6) Making binaries only for OpenSolaris users.

The driver likely work with GLD v3 in OpenSolaris, known as Nemo.
You can enjoy the new functions by recompiling the source code.

% rm Makefile.config
% ln -s Makefile.config_gld3 Makefile.config
% /usr/ccs/bin/make

OpenSolaris 2008.11(rc1)

The official releases is getting closer for OpenSolaris 2008.11 but I decided to give a try but running on a *very* old hardware : Dell PowerEdge 350. Luckily I managed to get extra 256MB to pump up the memory to 768MB. But the hard disk is dead. Really dead but I got an old IDE disk (Baraccuda) lying around somewhere.

All I can said , the installation is straightforward and I am impressed with the artwork or graphics. Really nice !

And here you go:

OpenSolaris 2008-11 desktop with Nimbus theme.



Things I like :

• GUI such as icons and theme are really well done
• Feel like Ubuntu (since I used Ubuntu since the beginning)
• ZFS filesystem as default (sweet)
• TimeSlider tool
• Device Driver Utility
• DTrace Toolkit (DTT)
  

Things I am missed :

• No OpenOffice in default installation (for a desktop distribution).
• No Tomboy. (Guess MONO will not be coming soon)
• No GIMP
• Package Manager not working (for me at least but command like to the rescue)
  
• No F-Spot

Scanner for Brother DCP-115C and Ubuntu Hardy

I never used the Brother DCP-115c scanner function. I have this printer for quite sometime but I seldom used for printing or scanning.

To cut story short : I need to use scanner function

• I know I need the SANE software installed first.
• Get the scanner drivers for Brother DCP-115C
• Configure it

It was surprising easy to setup for Ubuntu Hardy.

To install the SANE software:

Then download the drivers from Brother web site.

Next , follow the instruction on this web site to configure the driver.

Then launch the SANE and voila !

Redmine on Glassfish v3

Look like someone is faster than me ! It's have been my to do list to run Redmine on top of Glassfish. I have existing Redmine installation that running on top of Apache and Mongrel (the usual suspect). Well big thanks to Arun Gupta, now we have Redmine on Glassfish v3. Time to get some performance statistic between Apache+Mongrel and Glassfish v3.

Wondering maybe I should do it on Glassfish v2 too....just a thaught !

This is what I want ...

I have been downloading a lot of Sun software recently and most of the time I am using the Sun Download Manager (SDM) tool as the download manager. I must admit when I first used the SDM earlier version, I was not too impressed but lately Sun have been putting some attention to it.

That alright to me. But I still prefer to download it using some text command such as ncftp or wget.
And here it go, you used wget command to download Sun software.

Solaris Performance ToolsCD 3.0 available online

I got this news from Sun Blog (thanks - Stefan). This is what I have been looking for !

You can download it directly from here.

Here a brief description (from the Su Blog)

At Sun, for our customers and partners, the Solaris Performance ToolsCD is a well known project of the Frankfurt benchmark center since 1999. This collection of (public domain) tools on a CD enables you to analyze on optimize Sun systems. The tools are used and maintained on a daily basis during our benchmark projects. The CD covers as well many information and links to performance related literature.
This is the fourth release of the ToolsCD with the focus on Solaris 10 support for SPARC and x86/x64 based Sun systems.

The CD covers within 300 MB:

• dimSTAT v8.1 - collect and analyze performance data

• Dtrace Tools - Brendan Gregg's collection of Dtrace scripts

• K9Toolkit - freeware tools written using the KStat library on a Solaris 9

• sysperfstat - displays utilization and saturation for CPU, memory, disk and network, all on one line.

• cpuinfo - displays CPU configuration (number, type, clock and strands)

• meminfo - displays configuration of physical memory and swap devices or files

• iobar - displays io for disk-devices in a |cpubar|-like fashion

• iotop - displays |iostat -x| in a |top|-like fashion

• checkcable - prints the link up status for network interfaces

• nicstat - prints statistics for the network interfaces such as KBytes/s read and write, Packets/s etc.