Category Archives: opensolaris

VirtualBox 2.1.0 (and OpenSolaris 2008.11)

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Upgraded VirtualBox and booted up my OpenSolaris VM. VirtualBox 2.1.0 finally fixes the bug where if 127.0.0.1 was in resolv.conf on the host – no DNS for you in the guest (unless in the guest you were running a DNS server).

Haven’t tried it yet… but OpenGL Accelleration makes at least a checkbox appearance in VirtualBox 2.1…. so that could be rather awesome.

Going a lot better with OpenSolaris 2008.11 than previous releases.. It looks like it might be quite easy to get to the stage of building Drizzle on it.

Just figured out how to change to Dvorak! Yay, I can type again! (Go to Input Methods preference panel and add US/DVORAK as a language, move it to the top, and enable the input method application and do it that way).

Currently installing sunstudioexpress. Why not gcc? I’m pretty sure the version in OpenSolaris is still ancient (so won’t build drizzle) and Sun Studio does produce different warnings (which indicate real bugs in a bunch of cases).

Things I wish were packaged: latest protobufs, latest bzr, gcc 4.x

Firefox on OpenSolaris fixed (and installed bzr)

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Thanks to Glynn for pointing me to the right thread on opensolaris.org (in a comment on my Good adventures with OpenSolaris post). The package verification thingy (pkg verify -v -f SUNWfirefox) did actually throw an error (indicating some sort of problem). So that’s pretty neat. The fact that it got into trouble in the first place isn’t good, but corruption detection is the next best thing.

I still occationally hit the bug in VirtualBox where if you have 127.0.0.1 in your resolv.conf on your host (e.g. running a local caching nameserver), VirtualBox passes this through to the guest, so the guest tries to use the guest 127.0.0.1 as a nameserver – this usually doesn’t work so well.

The good news is, Firefox now works in my OpenSolaris VM.

The bad news is that even though I’ve gone and set my keyboard layout as DVORAK (with the Input Method Switcher applet), whath should be ctrl-l (for location bar) in Firefox, actually brings up the Print dialog (on DVORAK, L is where P is on QWERTY).

But, I’ve managed to download bazaar now, and the install was simple (just follow INSTALL in the bzr tarball). At some point I’ll badger someone to make an OpenSolaris package for it so you could do “pkg install bzr”, but you can’t do that yet.

The next challenge will be to branch repositories from the host onto a temp drive, build and test.