This time the workbench article is a bit more of a report whats already done. Maybe I'll edit the article again during the next few days if new tasks appear and are worth mentioning.

Events in Germany: Illumos / BSD people can be met at the "Linux Day" in Chemniz (Germany).

Fosdem is over

We've met and it was great to see the people from OpenIndiana and Illumos where you normally never meet in real live. We had dinner in the evening and during the day lots of hacking and socializing took place. It is no wonder that fuelled by the spirit of such a cool event, the number of code commits went through the roof in the first few days after Fosdem. If you really want your community prosper, then *spend* the money and make the people meet. And prepare to see lots of code comits afterwards.

The first user contributed blog article on how to install LibreOffice is here! Yipee!

I'm happy to say that we have a nice user contributed howto-article written by a user. Please have a look here: http://sfe.opencsw.org/libreoffice52-quick-install

If you like it and have a nice comment, then please drop the autor Solaris-Since a note in the comments.

Call-for-partitipation:
If you are doing interesing things with Solaris / OpenIndiana / OmniOS / SmartOS, I would like to encourage you to write about it here on the blog. We can open sub-categories if you feel your topic doesn't fit into the regular blog timeline.
If you know something, why not share it?
For instance you know how to configure a software we have in SFE, then I would really appreaciate contributions like small step-guides and howtos. Unsure if people will like it? Well you'll only know if you try it! Don't be shy! It doesnÄt matter if the article is short or long, even if your english language skills might be not so big, I can help out with lecturing!

LibreOffice 5.2 for Hipster - new packages

If you apply the version-lock workaround described here (link will be added later), you now can use LibreOffce 4 and 5.2 on OpenIndiana Hipster even you have updated past Hipster version 2016-11-11.
A small detail which makes me a bit proud is, building LibreOffice 5.2.5.1 was done fully automatic by my autobuild scripts. So the build was hands-free. And I was walkin garound at fosdem and only checking the progress on the mobile with VT100 terminal watching the tmux session with the build logs flowing through.

SSHFS is very cool - new packages

I gave the sshfs version 2.8 a try and found it a really cool thing.

Example: Mount the disk of a remote system through SSH:

mkdir /mountssh

sshfs username@servername:/this_path /mountssh
cd /mountssh

You can work on the mounted filesystem nearly as if it would be local. The fusefs module and libfuse makes this possible on the client side. This is available on Solaris 11 (+12), OpenIndiana, OmniOS (yes!) and you can mount any target server that supports SSH with sftp protocol (anyone know exact requirements?).

Worth mentioning is, that we have ntfs-3g available as well, so you can mount your NTFS filesystem to make backup copies or if you have a dual install on your laptop, you can share the data partition (oh well, disclaimer, warning, there is no warranty that ntfs3g / libfuse / fusefs it is always nice to your files.).

MPlayer 1.3.0 needs downgrade to 1.2.1 to work with ffmpeg 2.8.10

Accidentially MPlayer 1.3.0 slopped into the repo, but this version is specifically made for ffmpeg version 3. But because of dependencies, we are still at ffmpeg 2.8.10 (that is suffient anyways for now). So we need to use MPlayer 1.2.1 which is the recent version for ffmpeg 2 series. The package mplayer@1.3.0 is now repoved from the repository.

In case you got MPlayer 1.3.0 installed, use this workaround to get a nice and working mplayer:

pfexec pkg uninstall mplayer@1.3.0

pfexec pkg install mplayer@1.2.1

You can choose package smplayer to get a graphical frontend to MPlayer.

Upgraded IPMI for the build KVM server - what a mess

I did an upgrade on the Supermicro X10SLM-F board for the IPMI controller. Unfortunatily this made the controller unsusable. It was still flashing the "live"-LED, nut no way to contact it by ipmitool or via network.

After finding out that Supermicro's flash tools need a really, really plain MSDOS without any any memory managers loaded in config.sys, I was still not able to flash the correct firmware. It first it complained about it would be the wrong image, then it lost connect to the AS2400 SOC completely.

Then I escalated a bit and went to the manufacturers site of the AS2400 SOC and downloaded the tools from there. With that tools I was able to get it back to live by using the SOC tool socflash.exe in the mode "don't infantilize me - just flash the dam* firmware"-mode (option=f aka force).

Preparation work for enabling https for the blog - what a mess

Normally its no big deal to integrate SSL into a web site. But given the slightly special setup for sfe.opencsw.org with a Solaris Zone running the pkg.depotd daemons on one site but the blog running on a different machine offsite *and* beind a redirector, then there is quite a bit portential that things get complicated. And it got complicated. Currently you can see the full design of the drupal7 blog on the "http://" url. But when using ssl, you see the Javascript/CSS stuff not working as the incorrect URLs inside the Javascript/CSS are still pointing at "http://". This makes browser go into a more careful mode and not load Javascript/CSS stuff from the http:// URLs which are referenced from withing a https:// page. And I managed to create an endless loop also... (fixed now).

So for a moment we have to live with a mix of http and https (without designs). And sorry for the 2 days downtime this has triggered. I'll continue to work on getting https running smoothly, stay tuned.

Cleaning up old changes from my workspace

Over the time you edit one or the other spec file but don't commit it for several reasons. I started to clean up a it and did a mass commit on Feb 13th 2017. In case you see anything in the spec-files is broken now, then please let me know.

Current issues with packages - possible workaround

On Solaris 11 we have package mplayer@1.3.0 but this requires ffmeg@3.x.x/libavcodec to work. Though the compile went fine, at runtime mplay fails with libavcode mismatch versions 56 / 57.
Workaround:
pfexec pkg uninstall -v mplayer@1.3

pfexec pkg install -v mplayer@1.2.1

mplayer@1.2.1 uses ffmpeg 2.8.10 and this is our current version. MPlayer 1.3.0 has as major change that it supports ffmpeg@3, so we have no big differences reagarind what MPlayer can do.

What is next

• make samba44 package create a real Active Domain server where Win10 clients can roam user profiles
• do more cleanup of the workspace
• make the blog a real https site which works propperly even with JavaScript/CSS
• create a corner on the blog, well actually a "drupal book", to collect howtos and configuration setup guides to make live with Solarish OS easier to people (remember the call for partitipation above?)
• add package "libvdpau". The more recent Nvidia drivers have removed ths library and ask users to go with https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/VDPAU/

Whats in the near future

• Do a test install of drupal 8 and see how data migration would work
• setup a new webserver for sfe.opencsw.org on the other new SmartOS KVM server
• create a easy-setup package to make up a workspace for self compiling folks and maintainers/developers

If you want to partitipate in the project you are welcom! Please don't wait at all and take action right now to get in contact with me on sfepackages at g mail dod com, or write a momment here on the blog.

Have fun!

Regards
Thomas