Blogging Roller

Dave Johnson on open web technologies, social software and Java

Above: a random selection of photos from my Flickr photo-stream.

Friday Oct 08, 2004

Friday photo

I should rename this contrived little blogging crutch to Saturday photo. I never seem to get to it until 11:30 Friday night. This week, another photo taken by my father. The photo is a view from the Snowbird Mountain Inn in North Carolina.

Photo of misty mountains named Santeelah Vista
Photo copyright Charles S. Johnson, Jr.

Wanna buy some wood?

Was it just me, or was Bush's strategy for tonight's debate to out-shout both his opponent and the moderator?

Solaris x86 and JDS observations, Part I

Here are some notes about my adventures setting up my new Sun w2100z workstation with Solaris and JDS:

  • Solaris x86: I installed the most recent update of Solaris x86. The installation went very smoothly and seemed less trouble than Debian or Redhat installers that I have used recently. The only snag I hit was my monitor. The kdmconfig program mentions my monitor by name, but not my video card. I picked the NVIDIA driver but it cannot drive my monitor at 1900x1200 so I settle for 1600x1200.

  • JDS desktop. Installed recent build of JDS. The JDS desktop is based on GNOME, but it really looks great, much better than I have been able to make GNOME look. I think this is mostly due to a great theme, all new icons for everything, and proper config of fonts/anti-aliasing - but I think there are some other improvements.

  • blastwave.org and pkg-get. Installed pkg-get from blastwave.org which is the Solaris equivalent of Debian's apt-get. Once you have pkg-get, you can install any package on the list by typing pkg-get -i <package-name>. Too bad the JDK is not in the blastwave dependency tree; I think it would be really cool if I could just type pkg-get to upgrade the JDK too.

  • Upgrading Gaim. The JDS build I'm using includes Gaim 0.76, which can do all instant message protocols including AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and Jabber - Yahoo does not work because Yahoo has changed the password protocol since 0.76 was released. So I used pkg-get to upgrade gaim. But, pkg-get installs gaim in /opt/csw/bin, which does not overwrite the JDS version of Gaim in /usr/bin. Both versions of Gaim work, but I suspect that the software under /opt/csw/bin could get out of sync with JDS if I am not careful.

  • Eclipse 3.0: I used pkg-get to install Eclipse 3.0 (package name eclipse). Eclipse for Solaris x86 is linked to Motif rather than GNOME, so it looks like crap.

  • Netbeans 4: I downloaded Netbeans 4.0b2 from netbeans.org and fired it up. It doesn't look all that good either. The fonts are not quite right. Hmm... maybe I should try JDK5 and see it that makes a difference. I'll do that now and report back later...