Archive for the 'Software' Category

Looks like Google have been caught napping slightly. Firefox 3.6 has been in development for while and has been out for nearly a week now and we still don’t have an officially compatible version of the Google Page Speed extension.
Well, all is not lost, it appears Page Speed continues to work correctly and as [...]

Did you know you can now upgrade both VxVM AND Solaris using Live Upgrade without reverting to underlying devices? I didn’t, until today when I discovered a document on exactly this topic from Symantec: Upgrading VxVM and/or Solaris using Live Upgrade.
From what I can see in this document, it appears VxVM now comes with [...]

If you’ve ever had to setup and troubleshoot NIS+, you’ll know what a nightmare it can be and quite frankly how unreliable it is unless you’re 100% accurate with all your configuration and settings and really know what you’re doing. Well, you’ll also be pleased to know NIS+ is also finally DEAD!!!
Sun [...]

If you think Solaris patching is a complete nightmare, have a bit of spare time on your hands (don’t worry, you can still check emails etc) and really want to get up speed on Sun’s best practices for patching on Solaris 10, then check out the FREE Solaris 10 Patching Best Practices (WS-2700-S10) training course.
It’s [...]

I encountered a problem this evening that I can’t really explain, I couldn’t install any pkgs via the Package Manager or command line. Both were failing with the same error:

$ pfexec pkg install SUNWant
Creating Plan -
pkg: The following pattern(s) did not match any packages in the current catalog.
Try relaxing the pattern, refreshing and/or examining [...]

I’ve just had a “how cool is this” moment. I was browsing through the zfs(1M) man page on OpenSolaris and spotted this excerpt…
vscan=on | off

Controls whether regular files should be scanned for
[...]

I’ve just managed to successfully compile and install the microblog-purple Pidgin plugin on OpenSolaris (so I can use Twitter and Identi.ca from Pidgin). Sadly, the installation wasn’t the prettiest of things, but the important part is the new protocol library files compiled successfully and work a treat.
For the curious, it was a simple matter [...]

Sun has quietly released Solaris 10 10/09 (aka update 8 ) and it is now available for download. As usual, the “What’s New” doc has all the gory details of what’s new in this release, but for the lazy, here’s a quick summary of some of the more significant new features:

You can now install [...]

It’s with great delight I read that the Solaris 10 Recommended and SunAlert patch clusters have been improved. Ed Clark has sat down and finally improved the install_cluster script, now called installcluster, and the cleaned up the directory structure. The whole build and verification process has been improved too.
The improvements are quite significant [...]

I’m please to announce folks that you have one less excuse to use Linux in favour of OpenSolaris… you can now run Spotify on OpenSolaris, granted not natively, but in the same way you can on Linux: with Wine.
The process is really easy:

Switch to the dev repository (http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev/) either via the CLI or within the [...]