Developer's Quarterdeck Log

Special thanks to Eric Lowe who let me know how to get OpenSolaris working on VMware. Whenever I tried to boot OpenSolaris it would spin at "Configuring Devices" for what seemed like forever. It would eventually boot up if you were extremely patient. Eric let me know about a work around. Just add this to your vmx file:

monitor_control.vt = "false"

Afterwards it will boot up just like it should.  Just remember if you are using Virtual Center you'll need to remove from their before you edit the file.

The company I work for sells plenty of software to people that still use SCO operating systems. For some of us it is a surprise to find that so many still use Unixware and Openserver. But these people have been using these OS's for a long time and have proven to be reliable. They'll figure if ain't broke then why fix it? With the recent news of SCO filing for bankruptcy this is a good time for Sun to step up and woo some customers over to Solaris. Traditionally these customers were not on Sun's radar because they were "too small" but with the success of Solaris x86 things have changed.

Conventional wisdom would be that SCO customers if they went somewhere else they would just migrate to Linux. But do you really think there will be many in the Linux community will be willing to reach out them? Besides that, from a technical standpoint Solaris is much closer to those operating systems and from my experience would be an easier port than Linux. My experience has been that most of these SCO users still see Solaris as a SPARC product running on big hardware and Solaris x86 is an after thought that doesn't support a whole lot of hardware. Now is a real good time to show them what its really like.

This week there was a big press release from Sun about cooperation with Microsoft. The thing that caught my attention was about collaborating on virtualization. The plans are to have Solaris working on Windows and vice versa. That is great news as far as I am concerned. This got me wondering about Virtual PC and the latest OpenSolaris builds. I downloaded Virtual PC which is free and tried Build 72. To my surprise it booted and went through the install. First problem was X didn't work, just a black screen. It found a network card but that didn't seem to work either. There might be some tweaking necessary to get those things to work so I'll need to do more research. But the install did finish and OpenSolaris booted up to a black screen.

I also wondered what do they mean by Windows working on Solaris? Could this be simply be the return of the SunPCI card? A Windows branded "zone" like thingy?

While I have been using the Google calendar I have also been playing around with some of the other tools available from Google. One I really find useful is the Google reader. It's a pretty slick tool to keep track of all of your feeds. I used to keep around rss bookmarks in Firefox but that was pain if I was on a different computer, which is pretty common for me. Now I have the same experience from my laptop, family desktop, or from an OpenSolaris play box.

So I add an event to Google Calendar and I go to fill in the "Where" field for the event. I was really hoping that I could have created a link to Google maps in the field but it was just a text field, at least that is what I thought. So I just typed in the location's name "New Hazlett Theatre" figuring I'll just do a Google Maps search the day of the event to get my directions. But when I clicked on the event in my calendar view I saw a map link to Google maps. Now that's how interfaces should work, do things for me without me telling it to for things I want done anyway.

This past week was just one of those weeks where all kinds of things went wrong. Things like a big dental bill, blown tire, TV that broke, and my CLIÉ UX-50 with a completely dead screen. But there is a silver lining to all of this. I really relied on the CLIÉ for my own personal organization. Even after just a couple of hours I was feeling the pressure of my life spiraling out of control into a disorganized mess. Because of all the other expenses from the week getting an immediate replacement wasn't a good option. So I remember I had heard good things about Google Calendar and decided to give it a try. Google Calendar is awesome. I really should have been using this thing a long time ago. It's my favorite Calendar program to date and it is a web app on top of it all! In the days of Web 2.0 I still should be so impressed with great web apps but I am. So I made a decision, what ever I replace the CLIÉ it has to sync with Google calendar.