It’s official, Jonathan Schwartz is no longer an employee of Sun Microsystems, now a subsidiary of Oracle Inc. Fortunately for us in his goodbye blog post he’s said his blog will be transferred to a new address and maintained, and he’s even jumped on Twitter again.
Ever since I postulated back in April as to what a combined Oracle-Sun company would do, in the back of my mind I’ve also been thinking what it would look like. Now we get a glimpse in the form of the Oracle Exadata V2 server, the second advertisement after their triumphant "Oracle Buys Sun" faux billboard graphic.
Despite studying it again for several weeks, every time I see I have a Java "Class" on my timetable I chuckle a bit. If you haven’t ever done Java or other object oriented programming before, Java is made up of classes, therefore the whole glorious thing is a delicious pun. Feel free to laugh.
Tee hee, Java classes.
On a slightly related note, who here thinks the old, impressionist Java logo that I’ve included here was better than their new stylised one? I can’t be the only one. Or perhaps I don’t want to know.
My experimentation with OpenSolaris on my MacBook Pro (Dual-booting OpenSolaris on a MacBook Pro, OpenSolaris, MacBook Pro, partition order) has come to an abrupt end, tragically because of only one basic but fundamental problem.
After trying it so I could run Java and Oracle stuff on it for my studies using the same OS they use at my university, it worked beautifully with all the internal hardware, except the trackpad. The workaround proposed on various forums and newsgroups is to just use an external mouse which is simply not an option when I’m in classes and only have a small desk to work on. I also think it’s a bit ridiculous to expect to use a notebook computer and not expect to be able to use the internal mouse.
OpenSolaris booted from the CD was far more polished than any Linux distribution I’ve tried, but I’ve decided to wipe it off the drive and reinstall FreeBSD in that partition which supports all my hardware out of the box so to speak. Not having the internal mouse working on a laptop is absolutely unworkable and a complete show-stopper.
Here’s hoping the next release addresses this problem. I’d love to use it; I even picked out a snappy desktop background to use with it!
I often find I can understand things better myself when I explain what I’m attempting to do. Spock would probably say this illogical, I’d retort that not all of us have the benefit of being half Vulcan. Thank you.
Since attempting to boot my MacBook Pro with OpenSolaris and since writing about it here an hour ago I’ve learned more about the problem I was having with the partitioning stage.
I found this page and on their instruction I installed the Sun Device Detection Tool which checks the hardware of machines and determines whether or not OpenSolaris and Solaris have appropriate driver support. Aside from the gigabit Ethernet card, I was told my original generation MacBook Pro had full hardware support. Cool.
Returning to the aforementioned page I saw the screenshot shown above and recognised the errors instantly from when I tried to install OpenSolaris myself. Turns out OpenSolaris needs to be installed on the first partition to work; I was attempting to install it on the third partition after the EFI and Mac OS X Leopard ones respectively.
I could mess around for another few hours to try and figure out how to overcome this limitation (when I was an early teenager I was quite the dual-booting wizard) but I’m thinking I’ll save myself the headache, backup my data and repartition this machine from scratch.
As I said in my previous post about this, this semester I’m working almost exclusively with Java and Oracle software and I’m SSH’ing into Solaris machines at the campus here already, and I’d like to be able to use a similar setup on my own machine too. Also I love trying new things :).
Given I’m working almost exclusively with Java and Oracle software this semester at university in three of my four courses I thought it’d be fun and worthwhile dual-booting OpenSolaris with Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook Pro and use them both in a more “native” environment. You can download the ISOs for free from their servers, via bittorrent or you can even order a CD to be sent to you gratis. Pretty cool.
Problem is, I’m stuck. I’m attempting to install OpenSolaris 2009.06 which is the latest version at the time this post is going live. These were the steps I took:
Barely a few seconds into file copying stage, the installer #fails (uh oh I’ve started inadvertently using Twitter hashtags in regular blog entries, this does not bode well for my mental state!). When I clicked the log file button these were the last few errors:
>> Could not crate VTOC target
>> TI process failed.
I thought it could have had something to do with ZFS specifically, but doing some research online I came across this discussion thread where Basant suggests the problem is with the EFI partitioning scheme employed by Bootcamp.
Prime cause why it was failing was because of EFI partition. After I reset the partition id of EFI partition (#1) using "setpid 1to AF" and rebooted, my problem went away and opensolaris installed and booted just fine. I had also marked the partition as Active from Linux fdisk command so I didn’t need to do the fdisk.real hack.
The fdisk.real hack being referred to turns out to be this official workaround in response to a recognised bug in OpenSolaris.
Going to take another plunge, here’s hoping one of these tricks does the… trick.
FreeBSD 7.1 with Xfce, MS-DOS with XTreeGold and Windows 2000
In my quest to find the most useful virtualisation software for Mac I’ve so far used Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion and Q.app in various capacities. Today I decided to take a closer look at VirtualBox, the free and open source virtualisation software by Sun Microsystems.
Firstly the good news: VirtualBox is fast. Because it can take advantage of VT-x in the Intel processors of modern Macs the performance is in an entirely different league to QEMU based applications and much closer in performance to expensive (at least in the eyes of a university student!) commercial products from VMware and Parallels.
Because of it’s higher performance, VirtualBox can run all current flavours of BSD, Linux and Windows that I’ve thrown at it just beautifully. Creating machines is a snap, and the shortcut keys for commands such as hard reset (command-R) are the best of any Mac virtualisation product I’ve used.
Unfortunately for me there have been some problems. For starters, considering it’s a Sun product I found it disheartening to find OpenSolaris 08.11 can’t pass the initial boot stage to install without giving an error which is a shame. FreeBSD has difficulty using the emulated optical drive which in practical usage is fine but it means you need to initally install over a network, no easy install of an ISO is possible. And for my electronic nostalgia, VirtualBox crashes whenever I attempt to load either the EMM386 or UMBCPI upper memory managers in MS-DOS 6.22 or PC DOS 2000 despite exhaustive attempts to map the correct memory addresses.
As I said on my Q.app review, my first generation Core Duo MacBook Pro seems to be a very quirky machine for virtualisation: it seems to have troubles than most Apple people don’t seem to have! Keeping this in mind I’m ready to chalk these problems up to my eccentric machine, but it’s still a bit disheartening.
VirtualBox has the potential to be an amazing product, and certainly for Windows and Linux it does the job beautifully — especially for the price! Unfortunately for my own current needs though I’m going to have to give it a pass; while it does run Windows 2000 amazingly well I’d prefer not to have to use several higher end virtualisation products for different things.
Showing my support running OpenSolaris in VirtualBox on my Mac :-)
Well it’s official, Sun Microsystems found a suitor not in IBM, Apple or Microsoft, but with Oracle. I must say on the whole I’m cautiously relieved, though there are some things that worry me. What an ambiguous sentence. Well you know what they say, certainty is hobgoblin of the fool… right? Wait, that’s not how it goes.
Firstly, Java and Solaris absolutely make sense for Oracle; I believe I read somewhere that (paraphrasing) Larry Ellison claimed Solaris was the most effective Unix system out there for use with Oracle infrastructure. I haven’t played with OpenSolaris (or Linux for that matter) to the extent I’ve used FreeBSD but I was really impressed by it’s completeness and quality. I’m also interested in licencing; as a BSD guy the CDDL that has prevented Linux users from adopting ZFS and Dtrace hasn’t bothered me but Oracle’s work with Linux may see it change to the GPL… maybe.
What I’m also interested in is Sun’s free and open source acquisitions and assets, namely NetBeans, VirtualBox, OpenOffice.org and MySQL. If they keep them and continue to support them I don’t see any problem, and one could argue that said projects would benefit from being part of a larger company in the same vein as Linux at IBM. Some brainstorming on each:
NetBeans would compliment their Java acquisition, but Oracle is a signed member of the Eclipse foundation. Will Oracle attempt to merge it, ditch it or continue to develop it and instead ditch Eclipse?
VirtualBox at Oracle is a fascinating combination. Could Oracle somehow leverage VirtualBox’s virtualisation technology to more efficently deploy servers with Oracle’s database? They could do it with Solaris too!
OpenOffice.org is a real wildcard. One could potentially see Oracle leverage OOo against Microsoft, or perhaps they could pull a Novell and instead fork it into an independent stream and an Oracle branded product that could use groupware Oracle develops. The possibilities are extremely intriguing.
MySQL for me is a major concern. Oracle’s databases and MySQL are light years apart in features and from what I’ve heard scalability, but the gap is much narrower than it was even a few years ago. Is it conceivable Oracle would intentionally cripple MySQL or keep it with only a subset of features so as to not cannibalise their bread and butter? If they do, might we see MySQL forks or even a general move to PostgreSQL?I’ve done work for Oracle in the past but I still don’t know the inner workings of the company or the details regarding merged product lines (ala PeopleSoft and Siebel). Whatever the outcome, I’ll be watching closely.
As I’ve said here before I have huge respect for Sun and have always wanted a pimped out Sun Workstation to really get stuck into Solaris. In fact if I were offered a Mac Pro or a similarly high end Sun Workstation I’d take the latter just because I’ve used them at university but ave never had one of my own before!
The biggest question I still have though is: what will happen to one of my top technology idols Jonathan Schwartz? Will he get a position in Oracle? Will he continue to blog from there? Or perhaps a more pertinent question would be: will he be allowed to blog from there?
I wish Sun the best in this transition period.
As you can tell from his link prominently displayed on my blogroll here and on my public OPML feeds and such, I’m an avid reader of Jonathan Schwartz’s weblog over at Sun Microsystems.
I don’t own any Sun hardware (an issue of price not choice, I’d love to get my hands on a Sun x64 or SPARC Workstation!); I generally prefer using scripting languages to Java; while I’ve dappled in OpenSolaris I’m still at heart a FreeBSD guy, but I find most of what he says to be interesting and unconventional. It’s rare for a CEO of a company to be so forthcoming, blunt and willing to accept comments.
ASIDE: It was Jonathan Schwartz and my cousin James Ross of Beginning Algorithms fame who inspired me back at the end of 2004 to try having long hair in the hopes I would look as cool with a ponytail and glasses as they do. As of 2009 my hair is finally long enough, but doesn’t suit me. Maybe I don’t have the right face… but that said, I had to try to find out!
I really do like Sun’s desktops, they seem to be the only company other than Apple with their Mac Pro that takes the extra care and effort to design clean and organised machines internally:
But I digress. Again!
I meant to quote his Barack Obama post from November last year just because I thought it was the best one I read after Obama’s victory, but it got lost in the oceans of draft posts and should-have-done things. My life now seems to be filling up with two of such things for each thing I finish.
Change Has Come to America
On behalf of Sun Microsystems, I would like to offer my sincerest congratulations to President elect Barack Obama. What an extraordinary accomplishment.
I would also like to extend my congratulations to his web team for having chosen MySQL as the platform behind their election web site, BarackObama.com.
Lest many of you get your hopes up, we cannot guarantee the White House to all MySQL users.
I’m pleased he clarified his position in that last line, though I admit to being disappointed I can’t be politically accommodated! I’ll forgive him though because, just like Atuuschaaw, he and I share the Germanic "sch" in our names. And because all three of us aren’t Bill Kurtis.
I was trying to download the latest monthy version of Solaris Express from the Sun website, but it kept disconnecting. According to the site, if you have download troubles you can grab yourself a free copy of the Sun Download Manager.
Sun Download Manager is a small Java application that makes downloading large software packages from the Sun Download Center fast, easy, and more reliable than ever before.
Features include:
- Built-in file verification system works with Sun Download Center (SDLC).
- Supports resumable downloading.
- Cross-platform, cross-browser support.
- Free of charge.
I was very impressed with this programme on Mac OS X. It’s less than 165 kilobytes in size, and a great way to organise not only Sun downloads but other stuff too. Definelty worth a sticky beak if you’re interested in a very lightweight download manager for Solaris (really!), Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
I'm Ruben Schade, welcome to my labour of love mix of tech, anime, thoughts and nonsense from Singapore and Australia. Thanks for stopping by.
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