Final day at FOSS.in (2nd Dec 05) had a talk by Jonathan Corbet (Editor Linux Weekly News - http://lwn.net and co-author of the book 'Linux Device Drivers') on mutual exclusion in the linux kernel which was followed by Alan Cox (former kernel maintainer) on Writing a Modern Linux Device Driver which was loaded with far too much info for a one hour session, anyways got some pointers. I attended these two and went to work.
Read more here: http://planet.foss.in/
Got a Belenix LiveCD based on Open Solaris - it is memory intensive and the GUI does not render after boot. Apart from that Yahoo seemed somewhat subdued at the FOSS.in conference, they had sponsored the event every year, but not this time. Google was an official sponsor and the buzz in their stall was evident all the time. Sun also generated lots of frenzy with their software and contests.
[Update: The OpenSolaris team here in Bangalore, came back and wanted to know what the exact problem was and I registered based on their requests to the BOSUG-Bangalore OpenSolaris Users Group - they have already started looking into it, as many users complained on the bootup and X startup hangups for Belenix. These guys are actively following the community strategy - remember the Bazaar model of development ?]
[UPDATE 2 - I am browsing at work from Belenix - XFCE is smooth and ethernet was detected immediately without hassles - its amazing.
Not enough RAM at home was the culprit. APOLOGIES TO THE OPENSOLARIS TEAM FOR THE NEGATIVE PUBLICITY ;-)]
I installed Ubuntu Linux 5.04 today to try it out ... Works ok; comes only with Gnome and video support and mp3 playback is absent. Made .wav files play using OSS sound drivers + esd (enlightened sound daemon) on the Totem player. The package manager 'synaptic' is useful. Dialup works fine with wvdial. Also USB support on linux is much better now - OpenSUSE, which I overwrote, detected a pen-drive instantly.
Got the book 'Made In Japan - Akio Morita and Sony' by the former chairman of Sony, from a colleague. Need to start reading it.
Can you give some more information about what exactly went wrong when you tried Belenix ?
ReplyDeletehave you tried Slax? Comes in different varients with easily loadable modules
ReplyDeleteI must admit some BeleniX CDs are gone bad, but this is expected when distributed in a large number.
ReplyDeleteRather than bashing, you should report the problem in the project page and get a working copy in one of the Banagalore OpenSolaris User Group meets (ug-bosug@opensolaris.org).
Sorry guys, I know you guys would have spent some effort on this - will report to the mailgroup. Actually the GUI starts to come up - but then afterwards for almost 15 minutes, the windows never get rendered.
ReplyDelete@deepsan - A recent survey shows Ubuntu is used by maximum desktop users. Second OpenSUSE and third FC4. Slax is based on Slackware ?
ReplyDelete