Now I'm a Xubuntu user

The last week I was testing the last releases of Solaris, OpenSolaris and SXCE (snv_103) on my laptop, but I had the same problem with the ACPI driver than before. This is a major problem because with no wireless connection and with a difficult Ethernet setup is update to anew release is a pain.

Then I decided to return to Linux but I decided to change from Fedora to a clean and fast solution. The distribution is XUBUNTU and, really, I'm very impressed: It's very fast and stable, has a good package manager and I can do everything I need for now except browse smb shares. I installed the samba client but I need some software to browse shares and I don't want to install Gnome or KDE file managers.

I will take a look this weekend.

OpenSolaris 2008.11 is here

Yes!!! If the last Solaris revision was out on november, the new release is available for download now from the opensolaris.com page.If you want a printed CD there is a free CD order page.
I'm downloading now and I will try this night !!!!!

New ADSL

Yes... after 2 month of war have a new ADSL internet connection. A download test says 8850 Kb and near 450 Kb of upload bandwidth. Very good result. Now I only need some time to upload tons of pictures.
Maybe next week.

Fueling my life!!!!

Yeeeessssss, This is my not new Fuel!!!!!

From a year ago there is not a lot of SGI machines in the second hand market and the price of this few machines was very high but this time, I bid on this Fuel and at the end I paid less that I paid for my Octane2. It has some scratches and repair will be hard but it works very nice.

This machine is a 600 MHz CPU with 1 GB of RAM. I think it's a medium range Fuel. Enough to watch the difference with my loved Blue One. Firefox and runs so smooth on this but... the same day the Fuel arrived I installed an extra GB of RAM in the Octane (2 GB total) I received some time ago from Ian Mapleson, and... WHAT A CHANGE!!! I can say that my old Octane2 has changed a lot and now is a lot faster. If one R12000 400MHz with 2GB is good enough, what can the Fuel do with the same amount of memory? Unfortunately I have to buy a complete set of dimm's because all the slots are populated and I can't afford this now.

Now I need sometime to check how many processes are running in both machines, maybe I don't need everything that is loaded in memory...

More comming soon...

Creating your own RaQ restore disc

This is one of the easy admin solutions working with Cobalt RaQ's. It's easy to create a new CD to reinstall the Cobalt OS (OSRCD) but modifying partitions sizes and including Updates and Packages.



At the Cobalt Faqs site you can find this fantastic HOWTO, and create your special disc. this is a fast job using any linux flavor. In my case I have Fedora 9 running in my laptop and I find something different: Fedora doesn't include mkisofs but include genisoimage tool -OK genisoimage is linked as mkisofs but the parameters are not the same-.



Assuming you have stored your new OSRCD in /home/osrcd, the working command must be:

# cd /home/osrcd

# genisoimage -P YourName -b boot/eltorito.img -c boot/boot.catalog -R -l -L -J -o /tmp/filename.iso /home/osrcd



Another important thing: After the installation of the OS in our loved RaQ or Qube the LCD shows the name and net address of the server (after seccond reboot) but it doesn't ask for intro the new address. After a few seconds you can see how the LCD displays the name of the first package to install. This is a little bit strange because after the reboot seems that everything is finished, DON'T TOUCH THE FRONT PANEL KEYS!!!

The LCD messages changues between the name of the package being installed and the ip address until the last package is in the hard disk, the the server shutdown itshelf asking to turn off power.

My new OSRCD has all the updates created by Sun in order a runs nice but before a created a OSRCD with all Zeffies updates and it hang with a fault of campatibility (or something similar).

Bye

Unix in a low cost laptop (part 4)

Yes... finally I have OpenSolaris 2008.05 working in my bad ACER 5633 laptop. Very tricky installation (I'm not an Unix especialist) but now I have a true Unix OS ready to work. As I said before it was a dificult installation and the next words are the steps I followed to bring OpenSolaris to work.

The first problem was boot the OpenSolaris Live CD. The firts atemps, at the time of the CD download was available, went wrong because of cardbuss warnings. After grub boot a have warning message: pciclass,0607000: Cardbus Present State 0x11111111. But this week I tried another time. Searching in Opensolaris laptop forums I found a topic where a guy said that he was able to install Solaris Community Edition in a laptop like mine adding ',acpi-user-options=0x8' to the boot manager of the CD (grub). This workaround doesn't work for me but I tried the with Opensolaris Live CD. After a lot of tries and more web search the correct option to add in the Grub boot config was '-B acpi-user-options=0x8'. This is my LiveCD grub config:



When the Desktop was shown I started the driver tool and saw that my Ethernet chip is not supported (Broadcom BCM4401-B01) but this is not relevant at this step. The ACPI system isn't supported (or no driver included) and this seems to be the reason why I need to deactivate ACPI at boot time.


Opensolaris is installed!!! Yes but it doesn't want to boot in first attempt. First edit the Grub parameters to disable ACPI and at the seccond reboot I have a warning saying SATA timeouts, something like this: Jul 30 21:24:55 xxxxx scsi: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@12/ide@0 (ata0):Jul 30 21:24:55 xxxxx timeout: abort device, target=0 lun=0. You can see in this tread. The good workarround was disable the second CPU with de boot debbuger: edit the Grub parameters and add -kd to the second line (and the ACPI option also). When OpenSolaris boot stops in the debuger type usep_mp/W 0 :c, and then OpenSolaris started to load!

Now I had the User Login screen but ssssshhhh... I created an user account without password and I wasn't able to login!!!!! I don't now why but nobody can login as root..... Reinstall creating an account with password was the solution and... the OpenSolaris desktop appeared!!!


It's time to make the configuration parameters permanent. To edit the config Grub we have to change the file menu.lst, and this file is not in /boot like the linux systems. Using a ZFS pool the correct menu file is in /rpool/boot/grub. Because I can't login as root and I can't open File Browser with superuser rights, I opened a terminal window and used the su command to be root. This is my menu.lst file (I have all the disk for OpenSolaris):



Then I needed to disable SMP. Being superuser type gedit /etc/system and add at the end of the file set use_mp=0:

Now we can reboot an every thing is OKAY!!! Now its time to setup the network...

Switching RaQ's

I had some free time this weekend to realize one of my test. In this case I tested the second Cobalt RaQ4 with CentOS+BQ and Torrentflux 2.4. Very happy with the results. Now I can download big files of various GB's.

After this successfull test I decided to switch servers and use the new one as BitTorrent permanent client. To do that I only need to set the ip address of the new one like the old RaQ and install the no-ip.com linux client. And here start the problems: The CentOS+BlueQuartz distributions didn't have compiling tools.

I only found the GCC-Tools package from NuOnce Networks in a BlueQuartz package but it doesn't want to install by the easy way with the GUI. Fortunatelly theirs forums has the solution, install it manualy by the shell: Here is the link.

1. Upload the file via FTP to the server.
2. Uncompress the file: tar xfvpz BQ-5102*
3. Go into the RPMS folder: cd RPMS
4. Be root: type su and then the admin password as required.
5. Install all the pakages with rpm -ivh --force --nodeps *.

And ready. Now you can follow my previous guide to install the no-ip.com client.

UPDATE

With the new software, the symbolic links to the noip software have to be done in other way then the old RaQ4 software:

In the old Raq you have todo in the /etc/rc.d/init.d folder:

# ln -s noip /etc/rc3.d/S99noip
# ln -s noip /etc/rc6.d/K99noip
# ln -s noip /etc/rc0.d/K99noip

In the new CentOS is a bit more tricky:

1. # cd /etc/rc3.d
2. # ln -s ../init.d/noip S99noip
3. # cd /etc/rc6.d
4. # ln -s ../init.d/noip K99noip
5. #cd /etc/rc0.d
6. # ln -s ../init.d/noip K99noip