Thushan Fernando Uncut

Finally downloaded the latest 3.2.0 release of VirtualBox today and gave it ago!

From the forum post for this pre-release.

VirtualBox Version 3.2.0 is a major update. The following major new features were added:

• Following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation, the product is now called Oracle VM VirtualBox and all references were changed without impacting compatibility.
• Experimental support for Mac OS X guests
• Memory ballooning to dynamically in- or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only) (see the manual for more information)
• CPU hot-plugging for Linux (hot-add and hot-remove) and certain Windows guests (hot-add only) (see the manual for more information)
• New Hypervisor features: with both VT-x/AMD-V on 64-bit hosts, using large pages can improve performance (see the manual for more information); also, on VT-x, unrestricted guest execution is now supported (if nested paging is enabled with VT-x, real mode and protected mode without paging code runs faster, which mainly speeds up guest OS booting)
• Support for deleting snapshots while the VM is running
• Support for multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI (see the manual for more information)
• USB tablet/keyboard emulation for improved user experience if no Guest Additions are available
• LsiLogic SAS controller emulation
• RDP video acceleration
• NAT engine configuration via API and VBoxManage
• Guest Additions: added support for executing guest applications from the host system
• OVF: enhanced OVF support with custom namespace to preserve settings that are not part of the base OVF standard

In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:

• VMM: fixed crash with the OpenSUSE 11.3 milestone kernel during early boot (software virtualization only)
• VMM: fixed OS/2 guest crash with nested paging enabled
• VMM: fixed Windows 2000 guest crash when configured with a large amount of RAM (bug 5800)
• VMM: fixed massive display performance loss (AMD-V with nested paging only)
• Linux/Solaris guests: PAM module for automatic logons added
• GUI: guess the OS type from the OS name when creating a new VM
• GUI: added VM setting for passing the time in UTC instead of passing the local host time to the guest (bug 1310)
• GUI: fixed seamless mode on secondary monitors (bugs 1322 and 1669)
• GUI: added –seamless and –fullscreen command line switches (bug 4220)
• Settings: be more robust when saving the XML settings files
• Mac OS X: rewrite of the CoreAudio driver and added support for audio input (bug 5869)
• Mac OS X: external VRDP authentication module support (bug 3106)
• Mac OS X: Moved the realtime dock preview settings to the VM settings (no global option anymore). Use the dock menu to configure it.
• Mac OS X: added the VM menu to the dock menu
• 3D support: fixed corrupted surface rendering (bug 5695)
• 3D support: fixed VM crashes when using ARB_IMAGING (bug 6014)
• 3D support: fixed assertion when guest applications uses several windows with single OpenGL context (bug 4598)
• 3D support: added GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_object support
• 3D support: added OpenGL 2.1 support
• 3D support: fixed Final frame of Compiz animation not updated to the screen (Mac OS X only) (bug 4653)
• Added support for virtual high precision event timer (HPET)
• LsiLogic: Fixed detection of hard disks attached to port 0 when using the drivers from LSI
• NAT: fixed ICMP latency (non-Windows hosts only; bug 6427)
• Keyboard/Mouse emulation: fixed handling of simultaneous mouse/keyboard events under certain circumstances (bug 5375)
• Shared folders: fixed issue with copying read-only files (Linux guests only; bug 4890)
• OVF: fixed mapping between two IDE channels in OVF and the one IDE controller in VirtualBox

Bootilicious! Download links are on the site (updated for BETA2).

If you’ve downloaded the latest Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx you’d realise that they ship with the OpenJDK instead of the Sun (Oracle) JRE. The Ubuntu team has decided to move the Sun Java bits to the partner repository which means we need to do a couple of things prior to getting it through apt-get.
First add the repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list via the add-apt-repository command, then do a full update.

$ add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner"
$ apt-get update

Then lets install the Sun JRE & JDK as required.

$ apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts
$ apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

Once installed you can verify the correct JRE is installed with:

$ java -version

I have to say, this release of Ubuntu is incredibly refreshing Its matured so well in a short period of time, its definitely got the Lynx Effect(NSFW).

This is cool, xkcd is now command line based! Try it!

Some really cool wallpapers from Windows 7 Technical Evangelist Mike Swanson.

I’ve got the new Audi RS5 wallpapers on my work and home PCs if cars are your thing

I’ve been tracking the latest dev version of OpenSolaris (as of writing I just upgraded to Nevada SNV 130 ) because of some issues surrounding CIFS in the 2009.06 image of OpenSolaris.

To update to the latest BE, simply update your packages and image-update (after configuring the dev repository!).

# pkg refresh --full
# pkg image-update
# reboot

If you’ve created zones in your OpenSolaris system after upgrading to the latest BE you will need to upgrade your zones as well. Here’s a simple guide on how to update a zone named tomcat to the BE on the global zone.

# zoneadm -z tomcat halt
# zoneadm -z tomcat detach
# zoneadm -z tomcat attach -u
# zoneadm -z tomcat boot

The output of the attach and upgrade command appears below, here I am upgrading from 127 to 130.

Log File: /var/tmp/tomcat.attach_log.23aWZl
Attaching...

       Global zone version: entire@0.5.11,5.11-0.130:20091219T044839Z
   Non-Global zone version: entire@0.5.11,5.11-0.127:20091111T131831Z
           Publisher Check: Zone preferred publisher does not contain
                            entire@0.5.11,5.11-0.130:20091219T044839Z.
           Publisher Reset: Copying preferred publisher from global zone.
  Updating non-global zone: (Stage 1).  Output follows
DOWNLOAD                                  PKGS       FILES    XFER (MB)
Completed                              130/130   6842/6842  191.0/191.0

PHASE                                        ACTIONS
Removal Phase                              3529/3529
Install Phase                              7108/7108
Update Phase                               5247/5247
  Updating non-global zone: (Stage 2).  Output follows
No updates necessary for this image.
  Updating non-global zone: Zone updated to entire@0.5.11,5.11-0.130:20091219T044839Z
Attach complete.

Thats it, the updated zones are now booted! Whilst I’m posting this, if you want to upgrade to a specific version of OpenSolaris you can do that too!

# pkg refresh --full
# pkg image-update --be-name opensolaris-128

This will upgrade your BE to 128 instead of the latest – 130.

Excellent review of the Google Nexus One on ArsTechnica – as always. Don’t forget that the Nexus One SDK got released too recently.

Impressive! Definately awaiting the launch here to get one to replace the Windows Mobile phones. Whats even more impressive is the fact that it ships with a 1Ghz Snapdragon (ARM Cortex A8) processor with 512Mb of memory! Smooth cat!

Finally, a worthy competitor.

…you know it.

Here’s a video stream of CES 2010 with Steve Balmer launching Microsoft’s 2010+ products.

mms://wm.MS-STUDIOSMEDIA.COM/a10065/o9/presspass/1002811_CES_750k.wmv

Skip to about 6:00 because its all marketing blah – wait till you see Steves presentation!

We Bing, We Bing & We Bing, Bing Bing Bing. (12:30)

*sigh*

Ryan Asdourian from the Windows team comes in at about 27:00 which goes into touch devices.

• 28:38 – Dell’s new thin notebooks
• 33:20 – Bleo (?) book reader
• 35:10 – Live Drive & Office sharing
• 39:33 – TV, CableCard
• 48:00 – HTC HD2
• 49:30 – Slate PCs
• 51:00 -  HP Slate PC
• 54:40 – Robbie Bach – President of Entertainment & Devices (MSFT)
• 58:00 – Alan Wake
• 59:30 – Halo
• 01:09:22 – Natural User Interface
• 01:11:30 – Project Natal (awesome!) will be available Holiday 2010 (November?)

Enjoy!

Most excellent cheatsheet for OpenSolaris.

What a whopper of a weekend, Sun has ratified Java EE 6 and also released Glassfish 3 and NetBeans 6.8 to celebrate. If that wasn’t enough JetBrains has also released TeamCity 5!

You can read all about the Sun releases on InternetNews and catchup with whats new in Java EE 6 Overview from Suns site.

Next weekend its time to move Confluence & Jira (Glassfish 2) and TeamCity 5 (Tomcat) to Glassfish 3 in a opensolaris zone and see how things progress. Did I mention I love the zones in OpenSolaris?