Comments on: Adventures with OpenSolaris

By: Mark Callaghan

Mark Callaghan — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:51:29 +0000

The next Google patch will include Google perftools with all of the build changes required to link with it on demand. Because of oprofile, I haven’t had to use the CPU profiling that much. tcmalloc and the heap profiler have been a huge help.

By: Charles

Charles — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:47:57 +0000

Not having top threw me too… For the first few weeks I used top, which is available from blastwave.org.

Later on I found some references to prstat, and discovered it was a good replacement:
- Comes standard with (open)solaris.
- Is more lightweight than top.

Try prstat -a, and see the man page for more options.

Cheers

By: Charles

Charles — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:06:54 +0000

James is right about top… For several weeks pulled top out of blastwave (a repository of free software), but eventually I read about prstat and found it did 90% of what top did, and was more light weight.

prstat -a is particurlalry cool. Check the man page for more options.

By: James

James — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 07:50:01 +0000

Top not being there is because the solaris equivalent is prstat or some shit. DNS not working is because it defaults to NWAM which does that for you, except it didn’t for you? Possibly because you’re running in a VM. The upgrade dataloss thing is something live upgrade already did, just cleaner (snapshots instead of copying things around). Sol 10 isn’t worth bothering with, the last SXDE might be recent enough for you, if not SXCE will be but has a lot more of Solaris’ sharp edges.

By: Charles Menser

Charles Menser — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 03:25:14 +0000

The upgrade process has gotten bumpy with the latest builds, but it is manageable if you have the right instructions.

In case you want to give it another shot, have a look at:

http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=258658

Scroll down to “General instructions on updating to the latest OpenSolaris development build”.

Regards,
Charles

By: Glynn Foster

Glynn Foster — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:41:58 +0000

http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/indiana-discuss/2008-July/007664.html is a useful link to have if you’re interested in updating your set of packages (to track the unstable builds leading up to 2008.11). Unfortunately a few pretty critical bugs showed up in 2008.05 (around package management in general) which is causing a less than pleasing user experience. Will likely have ‘top’ available soon, it’s one of the top failed searches at pkg.opensolaris.org.

For those wanting to try OpenSolaris, it may well be better to skip 2008.05 (at least until a re-spin ISO is created), and jump to the following -

Primary Languages, gzip compression, 735 MB
http://dlc.sun.com/torrents/info/osol-0811-93.iso.torrent
(if burned to media, image should be burned to a DVD)

All Languages, LZMA compression, 652 MB
http://dlc.sun.com/torrents/info/osol-0811-93-global.iso.torrent
(if burned to media, image can be burned to a CD)

MD5 checksums for these images
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/indiana/files/md5sums_93.txt