Thushan Fernando Uncut

Earlier today, we had the announcement for OpenIndiana. Aimed to be the de-facto OpenSolaris Distribution that tries to be binary and package compatible with Solaris 11 & Solaris 11 Express. Its apart Illumos Community with 20 core developers providing (eventually) a stable branch with 100% free & open source distribution.

Not only that, you can also download a ready baked OpenIndiana distribution (based on ou_147) or if you’re like me and still using OpenSolaris DEV snv_134, you can upgrade via the IPS management tools. Having said that though, I’m not going to rush and upgrade my zeus box anytime soon as it will take time to settle in, but you can take the baked ISO’s for a spin in a VM I have found a few references to OpenSolaris still there and there is currently no xVM Xen (dom0) support nor lx (Linux) branded zones. Not to worry, keep an eye out on the roadmap and release schedule for what they’re going to deliver.

You can get a copy of the OpenIndiana announcement presentation slides as well or follow @openIndiana on twitter. Otherwise, see the Getting Involved guide on the OpenIndiana Wiki and join in!

In a way, its good to know that the beloved OpenSolaris will still live – thanks to the community, but at the same time, how long that community will be turned on by developing and maintaining it will be interesting – though other forks of OpenSolaris are backing it (via Illumos) – like Nexenta and Schillix which has just released a version based on Ilumos. All in all, WATCH THIS PROJECT!

In genius trailer! The .NET vs Java train left the station so long ago for me. .NET’s great for somethings, for everything else, there’s Java. Probably one of the best nerdy videos for the year!

UPDATED: First video was removed

With the Sun now set, Oracle has released VirtualBox 3.2 finally In particular some lovely optimisations for the newer Intel Core i5/i7 processors, Large  Page support (which helps significantly on Windows x64 and Linux) as well as a very welcome optimisation on the networking in VirtualBox as well as multi-monitor support for Windows Guests. Whats more RDP sessions are now accelerated (VRDP).

Amongst the changes from the changelog:

This version 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 (see the manual for more information)
• 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)
• Page Fusion automatically de-duplicates RAM when running similar VMs thereby increasing capacity. Currently supported for Windows guests on 64-bit hosts (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 for Windows guests (see the manual for more information)
• USB tablet/keyboard emulation for improved user experience if no Guest Additions are available (see the manual for more information).
• LsiLogic SAS controller emulation (see the manual for more information)
• RDP video acceleration (see the manual for more information)
• NAT engine configuration via API and VBoxManage
• Use of host I/O cache is now configurable (see the manual for more information)
• Guest Additions: added support for executing guest applications from the host system (replaces the automatic system presimparation feature; see the manual for more information)

Download from VirtualBox or get the Windows build. I’m really hoping the good Oracle keeps VirtualBox open, this is one kickass bit of kit.

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).

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?

VirtualBox 3.0.12 has been released.

VirtualBox 3.0.12 (released 2009-11-17)

This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:

• VMM: reduced IO-APIC overhead for 32 bits Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 guests; requires 64 bits support (VT-x only; bug #4392)
• VMM: fixed double timer interrupt delivery on old Linux kernels using IO-APIC (caused guest time to run at double speed; bug #3135)
• VMM: reinitialize VT-x and AMD-V after host suspend or hibernate; some BIOSes forget this (Windows hosts only; bug #5421)
• VMM: fix loading of saved state when RAM preallocation is enabled
• BIOS: ignore unknown shutdown codes instead of causing a guru meditation (bug #5389)
• GUI: never start a VM on a single click into the selector window (bug #2676)
• Serial: reduce the probability of lost bytes if the host end is connected to a raw file
• VMDK: fix handling of split image variants and fix a 3.0.10 regression (bug #5355)
• VRDP: fixed occasional VRDP server crash
• Network: even if the virtual network cable was disconnected, some guests were able to send / receive packets (E1000; bug #5366)
• Network: even if the virtual network cable was disconnected, the PCNet card received some spurious packets which might confuse the guest (bug #4496)
• Shared folders: fixed changing case of file names (bug #2520)
• Windows Additions: fix crash in seamless mode (contributed by Huihong Luo)
• Linux Additions: fix writing to files opened in O_APPEND mode (bug #3805)
• Solaris Additions: fix regression in guest additions driver which among other things caused lost guest property updates and periodic error messages being written to the system log

Download it from the Sun VirtualBox download page.

• VirtualBox 3.0.12 for Windows hosts x86/amd64

• VirtualBox 3.0.12 for OS X hosts Intel Macs

• VirtualBox 3.0.12 for Linux hosts

• VirtualBox 3.0.12 for Solaris and OpenSolaris hosts x86/amd64

Woot!

ZFS now has deduplication support which is as easy as just setting a property on the file system.

$ zfs set dedup=on tank/src

Read Jeff Bonwick’s (the supremo source for ZFS) article as it covers everything you’d ever want to know about what deduplication is and the various strategies behind it. Can’t wait for it to be implemented in OpenSolaris 2010.02 its already been integrated into the ON source base.

Whilst on the subject of ZFS, there was a very good article posted on OSNews recently regarding the lack of fsck for ZFS, it gives you a very good overview of ZFS, what COW really implies, how it differs from journaling filesystems found in Linux and ofcourse regarding fsck.

And to compliment it all, a deeper look at the RAID-Z on disk format in ZFS. Light reading for Melbourne Cup Day!

Microsoft has just released VisualStudio 2010 Beta 2 to MSDN Subscribers – aka Rosario.

I’m not sure why they’re going with the ULTIMATE moniker for Visual Studio, I still prefer the VS6 style Standard, Professional, Enterprise. Meh.

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN
  The comprehensive suite of application lifecycle management tools for software teams to ensure quality results from design to deployment.
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN
  A complete toolset for developers to deliver scalable, high quality applications.
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN
  The essential tool for professional development tasks to assist developers in implementing their ideas easily. (Note: Visual Studio 2010 Professional will also be available without MSDN subscription)

Some of the more exciting things that are coming with Visual Studio 2010 are documented on MSDN or a better one would be Vikas Goyal’s post and also his .NET 4.0 coverage.. Personally the Parallel extensions are the most exciting bits for me. The new Java 7 work is concentrating heavily on concurrency and its good to see both camps pushing the boundaries.

I’ve been messing about with OpenSolaris (you’ll know why soon!) and decided to install the OpenSolaris Extras repository so I can grab the latest VirtualBox install from the repository. This repository has the following packages (as of writing) and is recommended if you plan on using VirtualBox:

NAME (PUBLISHER)                              VERSION         STATE      UFIX
SUNWadmj (extra)                              0.5.11-0.111    known      ----
SUNWjsnmp (extra)                             0.5.11-0.111    known      ----
SUNWwbapi (extra)                             0.5.11-0.111    known      ----
SUNWwbcou (extra)                             0.5.11-0.111    known      ----
SUNWwbdev (extra)                             0.5.11-0.111    known      ----
develop/java/javafx-sdk (extra)               1.2.0.233-0.111 known      ----
service/compute/sungridengine (extra)         6.2.2-0.111     known      ----
service/compute/sungridengine/arco (extra)    6.2.2-0.111     known      ----
service/compute/sungridengine/domainmanager (extra) 6.2.2-0.111     known      ----
system/font/truetype/ttf-fonts-core (extra)   1.0-0.111       known      ----
system/iiim/ja/atok (extra)                   17-0.111        known      ----
system/iiim/ja/wnn8 (extra)                   8-0.111         known      ----
virtualbox (extra)                            3.0.8-0.101     known      ----
virtualbox/kernel (extra)                     3.0.8-0.101     known      ----
web/firefox/plugin/flash (extra)              10.0.32.18-0.111 known      ----

So what do you need to get these freebies? (source help)

• Register if you haven’t already with Sun, otherwise login to your Sun Online Account get your certificates.
• Download the Key and Certificate files onto your desktop. They are named OpenSolaris_extras.key.pem and OpenSolaris_extras.certificate.pem respectively.
• Now we need to create a directory in /var/pkg to store the certificates – ensuring they have the correct permissions. Then we’ll add them to the folder.

  $ pfexec mkdir -m 0755 -p /var/pkg/ssl
  $ pfexec cp -i ~/Desktop/OpenSolaris_extras.key.pem /var/pkg/ssl
  $ pfexec cp -i ~/Desktop/OpenSolaris_extras.certificate.pem /var/pkg/ssl

• Then we add them to our configuration.

  $ pfexec pkg set-authority \
      -k /var/pkg/ssl/OpenSolaris_extras.key.pem \
      -c /var/pkg/ssl/OpenSolaris_extras.certificate.pem \
      -O https://pkg.sun.com/opensolaris/extra extra

• To test the above worked get a list of the packages in the repository with the command below. Your output should be similar to mine above.

  $ pkg list -a 'pkg://extra/*'

Now make sure your datetime settings are valid when you do the above, as I found mine was a little out of date and raised a few python exceptions.