“Completing post install setup”

If after entering username/password you see a small window (with a going back and forth blue “slider”) saying:

“Completing post install setup”

most likely svc:/system/postrun/default service is not running.

Check the status:

# svcs -vx postrun

and enable it if it’s disabled (for example, after a system upgrade)

# svcadm enable postrun

Related system packages:

# pkginfo | fgrep postrun
GNOME2 SUNWpostrun Delayed execution environment for procedural package scripts
GNOME2 SUNWpostrun-root Delayed execution environment for procedural package scripts – / filesystem

Vermillion on OpenSolaris

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.

X libs and X fonts

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.

Switching keyboard layouts and IIIM

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:

iiim-properties sets the hot-keys ( <Ctrl>-<space> by default) and available languages

The following processes must be running:

  • iiim-xbe
  • /usr/bin/iiimx -iiimd
  • iiimd -nodaemon -desktop -udsfile /tmp/.iiim-username/:3.0 \
         -vardir /export/home/username...

If no processes are running they can be started with:

/usr/bin/iiimx -iiimd

The processes are supposed to be started during the logging in by /usr/dt/config/Xsession.d/0020.dtims

If $DTSTARTIMS is set to True:

it calls either /usr/dt/config/$LANG/0020.dtims (if it exists)

or /usr/openwin/lib/locale/common/dtims and if ($LANG ends up in .UTF-8 or contains .UTF-8@) /usr/openwin/lib/locale/common/imsscript/S505multi