Snv_92 has been entertaining me since I upgraded from quite stable snv_88. I’m hitting a bug after a bug. (See here).

This is the latest - unkillable process, which can’t be killed with kill -9 or zone reboot. Reboot just hangs. Truss ends up with:

dtrace shows nothing. The only workaround is to reboot the entire system.

See also:

Revenge of the unkillable process
Unkillable process
Bug ID 6455727

After upgrading to Nevada b92 SqueezeCenter refused to start with the following error:

But the actual problem is Scalar::Util. To solve the problem reinstall Scalar::Util and then Compress::Zlib. Use force install if CPAN says that the latest version is already installed:

Sources: whirlpool.net.au and Usenet forums.

Alan Coopersmith wrote :

FreeType2 is what converts a TTF or other font file into a pattern of bits displayed on the screen, but it has lots of flags that control how that’s done (anti-aliasing, hinting, LCD optimization, etc.).

Xft2 is the library that calls FreeType to get a bit pattern and then displays that bit pattern on the X server, via either the Render extension or plain Xlib (but plain Xlib is slow).

fontconfig is the library that finds /usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/Times.ttf when you ask for “Times Roman 12″. (It’s called by either Xft2 or pango, I forget which.)

pango is the library that calls Xft with a list of glyphs and locations to display them at, after determining what ordering and spacing they should be laid out in, and what glyphs to display for a given character string (which is much easier for English than for languages like Arabic
or Hindi).

GTK+ is the library that applications call to draw their interface on screen (the toolkit), and it calls pango to draw the text portion of those interfaces.

I’m not sure if cairo calls pango or goes direct to Xft2.

Just a brain dump.

• Firefox for Solaris can be downloaded from Contributed Releases
• 3.0 (release) is actually 3.0rc2 for Solaris
• 3.0 eats less resources than 2.x
• Font anti-aliasing is broken (also, see here)
• 3.0 looks faster than 2.x
• 3.0 is EXTREMELY slow if x-forwarded (I tried to forward from a non-global zone to a global one). I heard that the reason might be Xrender lib. Related bug 6699647?
• X-forwarding crashes Nevada b92
• Most of useful extensions are not (yet?) ported to 3.0 (e.g. adblock(updated), tabmixplus (here’s a dev version), X-Ray)
• 3.0 is not included into b93 (see here)
• Field Guide to Firefox 3
• Firefox 3 Revealed - Free PDF book
• BadGC with flash in non-current tab on Solaris (This bug should be fixed in Flash Player 9.0.125.0. See announcement)
• 3.0 becomes an unkillable process if started from a zone

The idea was to use “bare” SqueezeCenter without bundled CPAN (the CPAN directory was moved away) modules, Solaris 11 (or Nevada build 88) and supplied with Solaris PERL and MySQL.

Then if you start slimserver.pl the errors will let you know which CPAN modules to install. For example:

Or For Nevada b95:

Usually, the bundled CPAN is not up to date. So, let’s install it first:

To install (or upgrade) a module run the following:

The only exception is Encode/Detect/Detector.pm or Encode::Detect::Detector. It’s has not being touched by the developer for many years and is not recommended for use. The module can be compiled with c++ or g++ (instead of used by default cc or gcc), but with a lot of pain and manual intervention. The easiest way is to get rid of it completely:

• Remove Encode::Detect::Detector from modules.conf (in the root directory of SqueezeCenter)
• Remove or comment the following line in Slim/Utils/Unicode.pm:
  use Encode::Detect::Detector;

For the first time I did not have to do anything special to compile wine. Just configure and gmake. The rest is pretty the same: Picasa runs at 100% CPU load, Firefox 3b5 crashes every 5 minutes ;-)

If lsof is installed in your system:

If lsof is not installed:

• Run pfiles /proc/* | less
• Search for port:
  • Press </>
  • Type port: 23
  • Press <Enter>

The result may look like:

New release, new features, new bug fixes and new bugs.
Let’s start with compiling.
[read more...]

A short guide on how to recover a broken DiskSuite mirror.
[read more...]

Internet/Intranet Input Method (IIIM) is a distributed Input Method solution that provides Input support for Java & X11 clients via Internet/Intranet. The related documentation can be found here.

When I upgraded from snv_83a to snv_85 I lost the ability to switch layouts. This is what I discovered:

[read more...]