Wibblelog

I’ve finally gotten around to messing with OpenSolaris a bit at home, and I’m simultaneously impressed and disappointed. I’ve been excited about stuff like ZFS for a long time now, and I’m anxious to run my home fileserver with that, but as with all projects in computing it’s more annoying than I want it to be to get things working.

My problem with Solaris and OpenSolaris at the moment is that it seems like the features I want are perpetually right around the corner, so I should wait just a little longer and then everything will be happy and perfect. First it was ZFS existing, then ZFS in a stable release, then ZFS root, then BrandZ (the magic stuff that lets you basically run a Linux distribution inside a Solaris zone), and now the Solaris CIFS server which is supposed to be super awesome and integrated, but doesn’t quite exist yet. The code is there, but it’s not in the most recent release of SCDE or SXCE or Nevada or Indiana or Solaris or whatever the hell it is I’m supposed to be using… Which leads me into another bit of complaint: Which freaking version of Solaris do I even want?! I was less intimidated by this stuff when there was just Solaris, and it was a big mean monolith of UNIX that required you to wear suspenders and grow a beard for ten years to use it properly. The stuff that’s coming out now is incredibly cool, but also wicked fragmented. I understand that project Indiana is intended to unify the Solaris universe significantly and bring it closer to the computing nirvana everybody wishes for, but as always, that awesome thing is juuuust around the corner and not here yet. I’m continuing to be patient, and now starting to try using these things and perhaps contribute to the community, but I have to wonder if six months from now I’ll still be holding out for the next must-have feature that will be just around the corner in another few months. The answer is probably yes, of course, given the nature of the computing universe. What I really hope for, however, is something that’s good enough to settle down with for a while and really use. I’m OK with patches, bug fixes and workarounds, as long as there’s something I’ll be able to install on my machine at home and know that I’ll be able to use for at least a year or so without absolutely needing to reinstall it to keep up with the OpenSolaris community. When can I have that?

There is a good side to this, though it’s shrouded in more complaining. I installed Indiana on my little desktop machine at home, and it damn near works. Aside from some glaringly obnoxious omissions (no compiler? no java? WTF!), I’m running into all sorts of trivial little things. For instance, I have a SUN KEYBOARD attached to my machine, and some of the keys don’t even work. I could really care less about the Stop/Again/Props/Undo/Front/Copy/etc buttons, but having the volume and power keys work would be mighty nice. Also, when I logged into the default desktop, which is a GNOME setup that looks exactly like Ubuntu (not a complaint, mind you), I found that the default terminal was anti-aliased, which I hate, and Firefox font rendering was NOT anti-aliased. WTF, kinda. I grabbed my .Xresources file from elsewhere and fired up a plain old xterm (which was not in the default system PATH, of course) and was happy enough. So what’s my point? The fact that I’m even bothering to voice these petty complaints about a Solaris system is fairly amazing. Think of all the things I’m not complaining about: X came up like magic, with the right screen resolution for my 24″ LCD panel. Audio works. Really - it just works. WIFI works, to my great amazement. I booted up, it asked me what wifi network to connect to, I provided it with my WEP key (which I have memorized, thankfully), and it just freaking worked. I’m still a bit stunned at that one. I mean, Ubuntu works that smoothly these days, but it’s still a pain in the ass to get Windows to work with the average wifi card if the driver for it isn’t included with Windows. Holycrap, Solaris beats windows at network configuration. Never thought I’d see the day.

Update: No sooner did I post this than I read someone else’s very similar rant right on blogs.sun.com: Read what Bill Sommerfeld has to say about the matter. Tim Foster also has something to say about brand fragmentation.

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All this “wireless” stuff is getting pretty amazing. It didn’t really hit me until I started using it all at once how much of it I have, but here’s what I’m doing right now: Typing on a bluetooth (wireless!) keyboard and using a bluetooth (wireless!) mouse on the Mac Mini attached to my TV, which is connected via wifi (wireless!) to a linksys wrt54g access point, which is connected via an actual ethernet cable to my Soekris box running OpenBSD (this is normally my home router, when the cable modem is working), which is connected via yet another actual ethernet cable to my laptop, which has an EVDO cellular modem in it (wireless!) and is providing the Internet connection for my apartment, because my cable is out. (which is another story, of course).

Simultaneously, my cellphone - which has its own GSM (wireless!) connection to T-Mobile - is connected to my Mac Mini via bluetooth (wireless!) because I have been sending mp3 files to it to use as ringtones, and also connected to my home network via wifi (wireless!) to provide it with a data connection to the outside world.

Additionally, I was just talking to Jenny on my nifty 5.8ghz cordless phone (wireless!) which is connected to the VOIP box (I use Vonage presently), which is connected via an actual ethernet cable to the Soekris box, which routes it out through my laptop’s cellular connection to the internet. That’s right, I’m using VOIP over cellular packet data, and it works just fine.

So, for the record, I’m sitting here on my couch in my living room using no fewer than nine radios simultaneously, and there are several more not currently active: the wifi card in my laptop, the wifi card in Jenny’s desktop computer, and the other cordless phone handset in the other room. Oh, and I suppose you can count the wireless Gamecube controller, which also uses RF, plus the PSP in the other room which has wifi, along with Jenny’s wifi-enabled laptop, the bluetooth dongle on my linux workstation, my wireless headphones and their ipod adapter, and of course I’m planning on getting a bluetooth earpiece for my cellphone (since putting something shaped like a poptart up to my face isn’t all that comfortable), for a grand total of at least 18 frequently-used radio devices in my little apartment. Note what’s not present in the list: any receive-only devices. I have an FM radio, but I really never use it.

So, I guess I’m slightly unusual in the amount of techno gadgetry that I have, but the only odd things I’m doing here are 1) using wifi on my cellphone, and 2) connecting to the internet via EVDO cellular. I’m sure plenty of people can top the number of concurrently-used radios, too. Can any of you? (hell, does anybody actually read this blog?) Please post a comment :)

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OSNews has a neat article (posted a few days ago) (warning, possible obnoxious flash ads) about the GEOS operating system as implemented for the Commodore 64, which is one of those neat computing platforms from the 80s that becomes even more interesting (to me, anyway) in retrospect than it was at the time I was originally playing with them. I remember playing with GEOS on a C64 that belonged to a parent of one of my friends in the late 80s, maybe early 90s, and thinking that it was pretty neat.  Way cooler than what I could run on my Kaypro PC at home, where I was struggling to get DesqView to run.

A few years later, early- to mid-90s, I remember seriously wanting a copy of GeoWorks Ensemble (probably version 2, and later 3) to run on my Kaypro machine after I had hot-rodded it with a VGA card and a mouse.  Too bad I never convinced my parents to get me a copy of it, because I still think it would have been neat to use.

Cool things I learned from the OSNews article:

• Apple was considering using GEOS as the OS platform on their portable computers at one point.
• GEOS was way ahead of Windows 3 (released at least 4 years later) as far as font rendering was concerned.
• Microsoft wanted to buy GEOS and incorporate their technologies into Windows 3, and Ballmer warned them that they would be crushed if they did not sell.  They didn’t sell, and Ballmer was right.
• There are people insane enough to write web browsers and jpeg image viewers for the C64.

Neat stuff.  GeoWorks (the company that made GEOS) lives on, at least somewhat, in the form of Breadbox.  It sounds like they mostly write apps for cellphones and PDAs these days, but they will still sell you a copy of what they now call Breadbox Ensemble if you really want it.

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