FOSDEM and Illumos Talk by Dan McDonald

  • Posted on: 30 January 2016
  • By: tomww

Dear SFE Users!

I'm looking forward to the FOSDEM conference on  January 30/31.  I'm attending and we can meet there (Ask at the illumos table in building K). Or come to Dan's talk:

Sunday at 1200  - see you there!

Dan McDonald will talk about the 5 year history of the Illumos project: Illumos at 5. It is the core for the free Solarish OS distributions. Dan has been interviewed before the conference, you can read the interview here. I'm happy that Dan as well talks about third-party package projects like pkgsrc, OpenCSW and my personal favorite: "spec-files-extra" and the independent IPS packaging project here on sfe.opencsw.org (targets Oracle Solaris 11 (TM), OpenIndiana (Hipster) and now OmniOS).

I would like to hear your ideas how the third-party projects can accelerate and help the Solarish OS go through the roof. Let's have a coffee at FOSDEM and talk!
If you like, you can as well drop me your ideas as a note here on the blog or you can email me at sfepackages at gmail.org.

Best Regards,

Thomas

 

Comments

ultrafire

Fri, 02/05/2016 - 16:06

Dear sfe community,

thanks a lot for this repository !!

Still 2 questions, and I hope this is the right place for them:

1.
Is there a stellarium build out there (x86 and maybe SPARC), I could not find it.

2.
Due I am searching for a new core i7 notebook, I am having trouble with the "optimus gfx".
Does somebody has an advice for me, which notebook is compatible with sol11 (prefer) or OI / openSXCE (core i7 + dedicated nvidia gfx). The main prob is nowadays, that I coulnd not find a NB where I could switch in the bios to the dedicated gfx card.

tnx a lot

ultrafire

Vermilion

Fri, 02/05/2016 - 17:47

About stellarium, did you try to google it? As for Blender3D I found an elder build that works with Solaris 11.2 (not tested 11.3 but should work too). Did google it and found it after some time. Maybe you get lucky with stellarium. Often older builds can be found and there may be a Solarish one there. Same for Wesnoth (Game): Elder builds can be downloaded for S11.

As Notebook, I would suggest Business Line from HP and Dell as they seem to work best with Solaris 11. Sometimes even better than FreeBSD! I also compiled Hatari and Dosbox for S11.2 if you are interested in some old Emulators. Just tell. Optimus, there is no support for UNIX so I avoid Notbooks with that option.

Best Regards

Vermilion

ultrafire

Sun, 02/07/2016 - 01:52

HI Vermilion,

thanks for the quick answer.

Stellarium:

A while ago I found via google a version 0.12 (sparc+ x86) or something, but I can't find it anymore, and because of headcrash on the notebook hdd (argh I had'nt a backup of the downloads I made), I have no actual pkg of it. I could get the source, but I tried it in the past (0.14 or so ?), and I run in builderrors, main by qt4 missing as far as I remember

Notebook:
Thank You again for this advice, but Dell just seems to have dedicated Radeon in the businessline, HP has as far as I could see you the optimus versions, and I had a look to a couple of bios am different HP's, all have no possibility to switch to the dedicated gfx :-(

I am goming to order an IBM t430, that seem to have the searched option.

tnx

br

ultrafire

tomww

Mon, 02/08/2016 - 16:11

Hi Ultrafire,

thanks for asking! I took the chance to try the currently available 0.12.4 in the SFE spec-files-extra repo, and with a small change, it compiles. During the next few days this older version 0.12.4 will be in the repos. It'l be available for S11 and if nothing goes wrong then for OI-Hipster as well.
I'll update stellarium to the latest version soon and upload these packages as well. But there is no timeframe commitment.

About Nvidia drivers and graphics cards, I currently run on S11.3 the Nvidia version 352.55 which is a half-way manual install. I had to uninstall the IPS provided Nvidia driver and installed the SVR4 one from the Nvidia download. Unfortunalty this version misses some include files for accelerated graphics in GL, so I stole the includes files from the previous boot-enviroment. If you need to got that path, then drop me a note and I'll see if I find the notes taken at that time.

The reason why I had to change the drivers: My old Nvidia card running for years went out of support for the updated Nvidia driver. Furtunatly I had a newer card on stock and this card has been to new for the IPS provided driver. Man! This resulted in the old card not working with the IPS provided mediam-new driver, but the new card not yet supported by this driver. So I ended up with a much less power consuming new card and a manually installed Driver which is the version from above and the hack with stolen include files needed to compile those fine SFE packages.

Why all this. I believe you should see if you can grab the exact excat excat card version in the notebook and see if this is supported by the Nvidia driver I wrote the version above.

Thanks for using SFE and please, spread the wor(l)d!
Regards,
Thomas

ultrafire

Sat, 02/13/2016 - 20:08

Hi Thomas,
thank You for Your effort(s). I will wait for stellarium (and other packages, too), and I tell You how it works. Question: Are there some efforts to bring the repo(s) also to SPARC platform ? It seems, that this platform looks like an unknown land in the OI/opensolaris/ etc scene (but the "origin" of Solaris.... ). Would be nice if the repos would be available there , too. (I know, easy said, but hard to do, and I am not a coder )

NVIDIA: yes, sometimes it is a bit cryptical...... but a lot better than the AMD-gfx´s ........
Has anybody experiance with SPARC-Platform and NVIDIA PCI-Express-GFX-Cards and CUDA ?

And yes, I tell people about this repos, thanks you all for the work with the repos.
br
ultrafire
(U5@440MHz, T1000-T1-hexa, T5120-T2-octa, Sun Blade Red 2x 1,6 GHz-OpenSXCE, Solaris 11.3@ x86/64)

tomww

Sat, 02/13/2016 - 23:06

Hi Ultrafire,

I just finished repair for the OpenIndiana Hipster VM which had fatal troubles with the boot_archive which was in the end troubled with the disk layout. Never seen such before.
This means I can now work on the promised compile & upload for the old stellatium 0.12.4 package. Once that succeeded, I'll do a version bump to the latest available version and try that one.

About SPARC, it is just that I don't have a suitable SPARC build environment available. I just received an offer for non-permanent a build zone. So I can start with SPARC soon.
I'm still looking for a T-Series or M-Series LDOM/Kernel-Zone/Non-Global-Zone which can be used for the heavy work. Like compiling some hours without getting into troubles cause by machine and disk load.

About Nvidia in Sparc, I doubt that threre can be loaded drivers for. But I might be wrong.

I have some homework for you :) .. and that is, tell me the packages you are waiting for. Or even better, go to the wishlist and enter the names yourself into the table (best) or the comments (good as well).

Regards,
Thomas

tomww

Sun, 02/14/2016 - 18:58

Just discovered that stellarium 0.13.x and 0.14.x need Qt5.
As this will take a while until we have Qt5, we can use the lastest 0.12.6 which uses Qt4.

I'll make a stellarium package version 0.12.6 - watch the repositories to see it appearing in the next few hours, given that no errors happen with the build.

Regards,
Thomas

ultrafire

Sun, 02/14/2016 - 19:36

Hi Thomas,

1.)
I just disscused it with my wife (because she sometimes need the computing power by physical ocean simulations, but don´t worry about), and maybe we would have the possibility to offer a non-global-zone on a t5120 box.
Could we get in EMail-contact for details ?

2.)
Missing pkg´s ( :-) )

I will think about it and I am going to enter a list :-)

br
ultrafire