Previously, I spoke of my OpenSolaris experiences. Over the past week, I've been on vacation, and I decided to try the latest release out to see how it's moving along. I installed version 2009.06 over my laptops Fedora installation. Installation was once again very simple--just a few questions, and it was off installing. I typically choose to use the entire drive as a single ZFS pool. OpenSolaris does not support disk encryption out of the box like Fedora or other Linux distributions, but work is underway in this area.
After the initial install, I immediately upgraded to the development repositories to bring in the more more bleeding-edge stuff( Fedora is pretty bleeding edge too ). An update and a reboot into the new boot environment, and I was up and running.
I discovered there are a few really nice new features and surprises in the latest builds.
First off is the integration of the new sound system--Boomer for OpenSolaris. This is now all integrated with the latest development builds. Sound playback worked wonderfully on my Laptop. In flash videos and playback in general under the previous sound system, sliding the volume control up and down caused serious pauses and stutter. The new sound system works much more smoothly and I noticed no more pauses or stutters while changing the volume. I have noticed that I get no headphone sound right now on my laptop, but overall, the new sound system is a nice improvement.
The next thing I noticed was the brightness control finally works on my laptop. The hotkeys don't work, but the Gnome brightness applet allows me to control the brightness. This was a major drawback of previous builds, since the only solution seemed to be a Linux live cd boot to fix the brightness.
Just a few days ago, I notice that my other major gripe has been fixed too--drivers for my two home computers wireless cards are now available! I'll be testing this out soon, since this means I have the option to put OpenSolaris on two home computers without hardware upgrades.
As I've moved around to different Wifi points, the Network Manager has had no problems connecting up to the different access points automatically using WPA2 and WEP encryption. I've had fewer issues with the automated OpenSolaris Network manager than the Fedora network manager.
As far as usability, my laptop experience has been far more pleasant than previous versions of OpenSolaris. With Eclipse Galileo builds supporting OpenSolaris ( 32 bit ) as a first class citizen, my development IDE needs are met.
Off the top of my head, there are three areas still lacking when comparing OpenSolaris to modern Linux distributions.
The first area is one I mentioned earlier--ZFS/filesystem encryption. I prefer, and many companies now require laptops to have encrypted hard drives. At the rate things are moving in the OpenSolaris development, I suspect this will no longer be an issue in the months to come.
The second area lacking is multimedia support. The issue here is a licensing issue where OpenSolaris can not ship with codecs to provide mp3 playback or encrypted dvd playback support. Attempting to play such media pops up an information box allowing one to get the mp3 from Fluendo for free or to pay for the suite of codecs ( I'm not even sure if this package will allow dvd playback). An alternative solution is to download the latest MPlayer source code and compile the code. There were a few issues getting MPlayer to compile, but drop me a line if you need help. Once MPlayer was compiled with Xv support, I was able to play back some dvd's though I did see an annoying video stutter happen every few seconds. I suspect one should also be able to compile the gstreamer plugins that provide the proper mp3 and video codecs too, though I've not gotten to try that yet.
The final area is performance. Linux has made great strides in the last year in performance. Boot time races between Ubuntu and Fedora have made a very noticeable difference for Linux users who run laptops or desktops and pay attention to the boot up time. OpenSolaris is not quite there on startup time. It still takes a bit longer to get to a login screen compared to Fedora 11 or Ubuntu 9.04, however, it's not terrible. The first OpenSolaris bootup after install is a lot longer than subsequent boot times, so don't give up right away if startup times are important to you. Shutdowns are fast enough to not be an issue for me. The desktop is very responsive, though I do see some waits when say trying to open a new terminal while un-tarring a large file. Linux has been tuned to provide a snappy desktop response in most distributions now, I suspect there are some kernel knobs in the OpenSolaris kernel or ZFS settings to help out here too. For the most part though, I find OpenSolaris as responsive now as I find Linux, but I think Linux still has a slight out-of-the-box advantage here.
OpenSolaris 2009.06+ is already much better that the 2008.11 version I tried earlier. Six months has brought in new drivers and new functionality for the desktop. As Oracle hopefully continues to support the effort, I think the future is holding a definite spot for OpenSolaris. Give it a shot and try it out.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Linux Kernel 2.6.30 Fixes Filesystem Latency Issues
After reading the post Kernel-Log-What-s-coming-in-2-6-30-File-systems-New-and-revamped-file-systems--/news/113157, I saw improvements were made to problems with the Linux kernel regarding slowness under heavy disk I/O.
After running 2.6.30-rc3, my computer no longer grinds to a halt under large amounts of disk I/O.
My only legitimate reason to abandon Linux for another OS ( BSD, Solaris ) has been resolved.
After running 2.6.30-rc3, my computer no longer grinds to a halt under large amounts of disk I/O.
My only legitimate reason to abandon Linux for another OS ( BSD, Solaris ) has been resolved.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Pixie Hollow Flash Problems With Linux Return
It seems the folks at Disney's Pixie Hollow site now force everyone to use the Flash 10 player to hit the site. Since the combination of Flash 10 and Linux fail on this site ( see my earlier post here, my kids are out of luck until this is resolved.
This is the only site I have ever seen that fails to be cross-platform/Flash compliant. If I were real ambitious, I'd investigate it further. But for now, telling my kids to play on another site works just fine.
This is the only site I have ever seen that fails to be cross-platform/Flash compliant. If I were real ambitious, I'd investigate it further. But for now, telling my kids to play on another site works just fine.
OpenSolaris Wireless Disappoints
In yet another attempt to play with the latest OpenSolaris builds, I was sorely disappointed when I went to get the wireless card working.
A desktop had been giving me hard freezes with the latest Debian install, so I threw on OpenSolaris to see if that would help. Only after a complete install did I come to find out the Linksys WMP54G ( RT2561/RT61Chipset ) is not supported under OpenSolaris. This is a few common card I've picked up at my local Best Buy.
In one last attempt to fix the freezing system, I threw on Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a little nicer about discovering and automatically installing proprietary drivers, so it put on the Nvidia drivers. I noticed it was using a different version of the drivers.
A re-install of Debian Lenny with the legacy 173.14.xx Nvidia drivers and I have yet to have a freeze.
Linux wins again.
A desktop had been giving me hard freezes with the latest Debian install, so I threw on OpenSolaris to see if that would help. Only after a complete install did I come to find out the Linksys WMP54G ( RT2561/RT61Chipset ) is not supported under OpenSolaris. This is a few common card I've picked up at my local Best Buy.
In one last attempt to fix the freezing system, I threw on Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a little nicer about discovering and automatically installing proprietary drivers, so it put on the Nvidia drivers. I noticed it was using a different version of the drivers.
A re-install of Debian Lenny with the legacy 173.14.xx Nvidia drivers and I have yet to have a freeze.
Linux wins again.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
The KDE 4 to GNOME Switch
I was happy to see the latest news that Linus switch to GNOME--a move I made and blogged about previously.
While testing out KDE4 and deciding on GNOME, I kept thinking, "...but if Linus prefers KDE, I must be missing something."
Anyway, the word on the street is that "KDE 4.2" is the "KDE 4" we've been waiting for. I'll definitely give it a spin and see.
I think KDE 4 visually looks great--even when in non-compiz/non-accelerated mode--the widgets and desktop look good.
In order for GNOME and KDE to compete with modern OS's, they need to look and behave like other modern desktops. The non-compiz GNOME desktop is starting to look dated to me, and I just don't trust a compiz-enabled GNOME desktop to be stable enough--based on my most recent Fedora 10 testing. Sure you can run compiz and change out panels and add cool applets, but that's a lot of work especially for the non-techie desktop user. Out-of-the-box, KDE 4 just looks modern, though it's been buggy and lacking in usability.
While testing out KDE4 and deciding on GNOME, I kept thinking, "...but if Linus prefers KDE, I must be missing something."
Anyway, the word on the street is that "KDE 4.2" is the "KDE 4" we've been waiting for. I'll definitely give it a spin and see.
I think KDE 4 visually looks great--even when in non-compiz/non-accelerated mode--the widgets and desktop look good.
In order for GNOME and KDE to compete with modern OS's, they need to look and behave like other modern desktops. The non-compiz GNOME desktop is starting to look dated to me, and I just don't trust a compiz-enabled GNOME desktop to be stable enough--based on my most recent Fedora 10 testing. Sure you can run compiz and change out panels and add cool applets, but that's a lot of work especially for the non-techie desktop user. Out-of-the-box, KDE 4 just looks modern, though it's been buggy and lacking in usability.
Flash, Linux, and PixieHollow
So I decided to try a little experiment and move some household computers over to Linux. Going into it, I figured there wouldn't be too many problems. The games played by my kids are, for the most part, online games developed in Flash. With Flash 10 now readily available for Linux on 32 and 64 bit machines, Linux would be on par with Windows Flash functionality.
With the computers now happily booting into Debian, I had one of my children log in to test it out. Wouldn't you know it, the latest online Flash-based game Disney's Pixie Hollow failed to load. Everything looks fine until you get a strange error message about it losing the login information.
After trying several different combinations of Firefox and other browsers I found a solution.
Solution:Use a Flash 9 version of the Linux plugin--not the latest Flash 10 plugin. From there, everything has worked fine.
On a 64 bit Linux install, this means running a 32-bit version of Firefox with the Flash 9 plugin. Running nspluginwrapper didn't work either, so I stuck with the 32 bit Firefox / Flash 9 combination.
To date, all the online Flash games play great and are indistinguishable from their Window's counterparts on the outside. Of course, I sleep better knowing what's driving the code.
Locating older versions of Flash to download was little tricky, so here is the link.
So far, no major complaints from the family on the migration. I still have a Windows machine for iTunes and a few other Windows games floating around. My goal will be to move that functionality to Wine or VirtualBox in the very near future.
With the computers now happily booting into Debian, I had one of my children log in to test it out. Wouldn't you know it, the latest online Flash-based game Disney's Pixie Hollow failed to load. Everything looks fine until you get a strange error message about it losing the login information.
After trying several different combinations of Firefox and other browsers I found a solution.
Solution:Use a Flash 9 version of the Linux plugin--not the latest Flash 10 plugin. From there, everything has worked fine.
On a 64 bit Linux install, this means running a 32-bit version of Firefox with the Flash 9 plugin. Running nspluginwrapper didn't work either, so I stuck with the 32 bit Firefox / Flash 9 combination.
To date, all the online Flash games play great and are indistinguishable from their Window's counterparts on the outside. Of course, I sleep better knowing what's driving the code.
Locating older versions of Flash to download was little tricky, so here is the link.
So far, no major complaints from the family on the migration. I still have a Windows machine for iTunes and a few other Windows games floating around. My goal will be to move that functionality to Wine or VirtualBox in the very near future.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Linux 64 bit disk IO Performance
You may be asking yourself why I've even bothered looking at other operating systems if Linux with an accompanying distro does everything I need. The answer is that Linux has two main problems that have been driving me crazy lately--no glitch free audio and terrible responsiveness when copying large files.
The audio problem is well known, and efforts have been underway to address the issue. I think the Linux audio playback is getting better now with PulseAudio, so this issue doesn't bother me as much any more.
The disk io responsiveness issue is less known. The issue appears when copying lots of or large amounts of data on a 64-bit kernel. The kernel load escalates to the point the system is unresponsive ( the load climbs up to 9+ on a beefy machine with a single copy command running). This is the primary reason I started looking at other operating systems.
A few days ago, I came across this linux kernel bug entered over 2 years ago. Interestingly enough, the load only escalates when I boot up using a 64 bit kernel--the 32 bit kernel is fine. I'm planning to jump onto this related kernel bug and see if I can offer testing or other support here shortly.
Follow up 1/14/2009: Looks like there's some progress on the performance bug. A Slashdot article here explains more.
The audio problem is well known, and efforts have been underway to address the issue. I think the Linux audio playback is getting better now with PulseAudio, so this issue doesn't bother me as much any more.
The disk io responsiveness issue is less known. The issue appears when copying lots of or large amounts of data on a 64-bit kernel. The kernel load escalates to the point the system is unresponsive ( the load climbs up to 9+ on a beefy machine with a single copy command running). This is the primary reason I started looking at other operating systems.
A few days ago, I came across this linux kernel bug entered over 2 years ago. Interestingly enough, the load only escalates when I boot up using a 64 bit kernel--the 32 bit kernel is fine. I'm planning to jump onto this related kernel bug and see if I can offer testing or other support here shortly.
Follow up 1/14/2009: Looks like there's some progress on the performance bug. A Slashdot article here explains more.
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