Rodney Campbell's Blog

I finally succumbed to the NetBook craze yesterday and picked up an MSI Wind U100.

For a mere $600 Australian the specs on this thing are pretty remarkable:

• Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz Processor (with keyboard overclocking to 2GHz)
• 1GB RAM – included in the price I paid I had it upgraded to 2GB
• 120GB Hard Drive
• 10” 1024×600 LCD Panel
• 802.11b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth
• 4-in-1 Card Reader, SD/MMC/MS/MS Pro
• 3 USB2 Ports
• 1.3MP Webcam and built in mic

I also got the 6-cell battery version for long life.

Before I give it to my school age children however – I’m thinking of doing a bit of research with it and I’ll try installing various operating systems onto it. I’ll probably give (Open)Solaris a whirl and I’m going to give a boot-132 retail OS X Leopard install a try.

In January of this year a number of work colleagues were looking at network media players which supported high definition material and specifically ones which supported material in MKV (Matroska) containers.

I did a little reasearch at that time and…

• it appears there are a number of players based on the Sigma 862X series chips – most of which don’t support mkv but some apparently do.
• there is a new Sigma 863X series chips which do support HD up to 1080p with mkv support.

DVICO TViX currently has the PVR M-4130SH and PVR M-5130SH (both available in Aus) which use the EM8623 but they state they have mkv support. It’s a PVR as it also has a HD tuner in it. They are also bringing out their new M6500-A with the SMP8635 which definitely supports mkv’s and other good stuff.

Popcorn Hour have their Networked Media Tank A-100 (only available in limited qty online) also based on SMP8635 which on paper looked absolutely awesome featurewise (esp for price). A good review is available here.

Tomacro limHD200i HD media player indicates support for MKV’s and perhaps uses the SMP8634? The huge AVS thread though indicated that some people are having general issues with this player.

Mvix currently only have players based on the older chipset but rumours are it will have a newer player soon.

Same for Ziova.

The Popcorn Hour Networked Media Tank A-100

Back in January I signed up on the Popcorn Hour “waiting list” and about a month ago my number came up and I ordered one of these online – it cost me just over $240 Australian delivered.

Apparently this wasn’t some elaborate online scam and a week or two later my shiny new NMT A-100 arrived.

In my next post I’ll talk about my experience with the unit and my view of it’s positives and negatives.

In my last post I had installed SXCE Build 84 on my Sun Ultra 24 workstation in the hopes that I could get xVM working – however build 84 still contained the 3.0.4 Xen codebase.

Last night I installed SXCE Build 85 and behold it includes the 3.1.2 Xen codebase and better still I could now boot the xVM kernel – looks like it is now time to play with virt-manager.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing however as I had some issues doing the initial install. When using my normal settings in the GUI/wizard install of OpenSolaris the installation would fail early on. The error logs weren’t exactly helpful, however it did mention the inability to create my user account. I restarted the install a few times and changed various answers during the wizard process and eventually the install completed successfully. I’m not exactly which change fixed the installer however I believe that in the last attempt in the screen where you select the properties of your user account I made sure that my Username (not loginname) contained no spaces and for my Locale I didn’t choose my normal selection (of English(Australian)) but rather used the default of English(US).

Something I did notice was that when running the xVM kernel I could not properly install the 64bit version of VirtualBox as usual – it would install but it couldn’t load the kernel module and whilst the VirtualBox client software would start up you couldn’t run the VM (no kernel module running). I’d be interested if anyone knows if and how you can run the xVM kernel AND VirtualBox at the same time.

As a starting point for those of you interested in taking a look at xVM I found the following links to be handy introductions:

The Sun System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System – especially part IV which has the chapters on xVM (the PDF version is also available).

A Comprehensive Overview of Sun xVM outlines Sun VM, including products, installation instructions, and using Windows XP on Sun xVM. The article defines Sun xVM as a family of technologies that addresses both desktop and server virtualization, leveraging work from open source communities like Xen that is being built on proven Sun technology.

The blogger explains his choice of Sun xVM over VMware and Linux+Xen and he also discusses the two types of virtual machine: Hardware Virtual Machine and Para Virtual Machine. He also outlines the starting of domainU configuration and its cloning, noting that one can clone domU in as little as one minute. He shows as well how to set up cifs server if one is running Windows domU and the use of virt-manager as a GUI interface to manage Sun xVM.

As a continuation of my journey to OpenSolaris on my new Sun Ultra 24 Workstation I’m posting another update on my experience so far.

Previously I mentioned I had installed OpenSolaris SXDE (79b) however I was unable to get xVM to work. I thought I would give the newer Community Edition (SXCE) (build 84) a try and see if there was more joy there.

The various OpenSolaris builds can be downloaded from here. Burning the ISO to a DVD and then booting the DVD and installing SXCE is very simple (especially using the new graphical installer).

Unfortunately it looks like build 84 includes the same (version 3.0.4) version of the Xen kernel as the SXDE build I was using before and does not include the newer 3.1 Xen code. As such xVM still won’t boot on my Ultra 24.

ZFS

Previously (during the previous OpenSolaris b79b install) I had setup a three disk raidz zfs pool (for /data) on the machine:

# zpool create data raidz c0d1 c1d1 c2d0
# zpool list
# zpool status

After reinstalling the OS this time I simply re-imported the existing ZFS pool and all my data (including my home directory which I put into /data) is back:

# zpool import -f data

I also wanted to share the volume via NFS read only by default to my home LAN segment but read/write to my MacBook Pro. Zfs’s set options now make this extremely easy (rather than screwing around with /etc/dfs/dfstab and the share command or even the newer sharemgr command)

# zfs set sharenfs='ro=@192.168.0.0/24,rw=MBP_IP' data

In Kernel SMB (Samba)

I also decided to give the new in Kernel CIFS (Samba) Service a try.

Start the CIFS Service:

# svcadm enable -r smb/server

Edit /etc/pam.conf and add:

other password required pam_smb_passwd.so.1 nowarn

After the PAM module is installed, the passwd command automatically generates CIFS-suitable passwords:

# passwd rodney

Enable SMB sharing for an existing ZFS file system:

# zfs set sharesmb=on data

and we are done – how easy is that. For more information check out Getting Started with the Solaris CIFS Service.

BIOS Joy

I noticed that the machine has a number of potential boot menu options which appear on startup (you can press F2/F8/F12 to go into Setup/Select the boot device, after that times out you are presented with the option of pressing Ctrl-S to setup the Intel Boot Agent and after that times out you can press Ctrl-P to do something else and finally you get the Grub menu). I thought that I would reduce the BIOS boot time by disabling the PXE Boot (Intel Boot Agent) since I don’t ever want to network boot this machine anyway. If you are thinking of doing the same thing – DONT!!!

After disabling the PXE boot the various operating systems I’ve got installed on this box (OpenSolaris and Windows 2003) could not enumerate or activate the onboard e1000 NIC. That was it – networking game over man!

Some google searching turned up a few results indicating others who had the same problem with their Ultra 24’s and the basic jist was they couldn’t fix the problem (even via Sun support) and they had to RMA their machines.

The following is what I did which appears to have fixed this:

Download, burn and boot the latest (ver 1.1) Sun Ultra 24 Workstation Tools and Drivers DVD:

and in the boot menu choose to Flash the BIOS (I had previously already updated my BIOS when I first got the machine a few days ago anyway) – it goes and flashes the BIOS anyway and on reboot the PXE menu is back at the default (2 second menu) and the NIC is once again working – lucky…

I ordered a new Sun Ultra 24 Workstation (Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme QX6850 3GHz, 6GB RAM, 250 & 750GB HDs) a few weeks ago and it has now arrived. I planned to run Solaris Express Developer Edition (08/01 – Build 79b) on this machine and then run a number of guest operating systems under either or both of xVM and VirtualBox.

Solaris Express is where the development of the next version of Solaris (11) happens. OpenSolaris has three main streams:

1. Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE) – is Sun’s tested release built from the OpenSolaris bits and additional technology that has not been published in the OpenSolaris source base. It is released every three to four months and replaces the Solaris Express monthly release.
2. Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) – is Sun’s binary release for OpenSolaris developers (code named “Nevada”). It is built from the latest OpenSolaris source and additional technology that has not been published in the OpenSolaris source base. This release is unsupported. It is updated every other Friday.
3. OpenSolaris Developer Preview – is the first milestone of Project Indiana. It is a single CD combined live/install image: a core operating system, kernel, system libraries, a desktop environment and a package management system.

Indiana is to Solaris what Fedora is to Red Hat. It is a frequently updated distribution that will become the next version of Solaris every three years. The new Image Packaging System (IPS) will debut in Indiana replacing the old System V packaging system.

OpenSolaris SXDE (79b)

The various OpenSolaris builds can be downloaded from here. Burning the ISO to a DVD and then booting the DVD and installing SXDE is very simple (especially using the new graphical installer).

Compiz Fusion

Erwann Chénedé has thankfully packaged up an easy install bundle for compiz fusion 0.6 + emerald 0.5.2 which is available for download from here. All you need to do is run the shell archive to complete the installation.

xVM

I was originally planning on using xVM on this machine however I couldn’t get the machine to boot into the xVM mode at the GRUB bootloader – it would start and then hang every time I tried. After some serious google research I noticed a number of threads detailing issues with xVM causing serious issues with the Ultra 24 hardware (basically killing the gigabit NIC interface at the BIOS level such that the interface was no longer even available to the machine when running in non xVM mode). I’ve decide to let this one rest till this is resolved and patches/etc are forthcoming.

VirtualBox

You can download the relevant VirtualBox archive from here – the only thing you need to be careful of is installing either the 32bit version (the x86 download) or the 64bit version (the AMD64 version) depending on what version of OS you’re running. On my Ultra 24 I’m running 64bit SXDE so I installed the AMD64 version (even though it is an Intel box 🙂 ). The output of “isainfo -k” will tell you which instruction set is being used on your machine.

Installation is as painless as a pkgadd of the package and then running “VirtualBox” at the command line.