After upgrading from snv_88 to snv_92 (Solaris 11 or Nevada b92) my home server started spewing the following errors:

[read more...]

After upgrading to snv_93 SqueezeCenter (quite predictably) refused to start again. The error was:

The issue is related to the same Scalar::Util module. Just force install it like explained here.

The current version can be found here: http://dlc.sun.com/osol/jds/downloads/current/

Tried to install Vermillion 94 yesterday (GNOME 2.23.4) but had to fail back to nevada_92 (GNOME 2.22.2), because 94 was almost unusable (e.g. right button did not work, window manager did not want to start automatically, etc). Both installers failed to install JDS correclty (missed or incorrectly configured packages and files).
For example, libgnome-desktop-2.so.2 was missing in v94.

If you can't login, if your GNOME session crashes, if you fonts are garbled or you see no fonts at all, check the following files:
[read more...]

If you see no images in HTML-mail in evolution, add the following line to /etc/services:

BugID: 4511649

After hitting this bug (yes, again and again) I had to unmount the broken file system and run fsck (twice). But then I apparently hit anoter bug (or a feature?) – I could not mount the file system back.

Neither pwdx not lsof showed any processes using /export/docs. The solution was to recreate the directory:

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