Blogging Roller

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...