On Thursday 03 July 2008 23:16, someone who identifies as *J.O. Aho* wrote
in /alt.os.linux.gentoo:/

Aragorn wrote:

Either way, it would seem that OpenSolaris is by far not as robust as
GNU/Linux, and given it's legacy, this is really surprising. :-/
There is a lot to do with the installer, I would say it's back on the
level as Linux had back in the mid-late 90's. Even Solaris itself have a
difficult installer procedure (at least when I used it back at version
, maybe in 10 years time, when the community of users is larger, they
may start to get a user friendly installer that don't use java.

Well, you mention two points of interest here. First of all, there is the
community thing. Given how Sun is not exactly playing by the usual rules
of Free & Open Source Software, and given that Solaris is quite a
heavyweight compared to GNU/Linux, I don't really see that community
growing substantially larger for the near future.

Secondly, there's Java. To Sun Microsystems, Java is the "end-all and
do-all" for everything. They even already have a desktop environment
written entirely in Java.

Well, so far I had always thought of Solaris as a mature operating system,
but given your reports on it - as well as some other things I've picked up
from other people who've also given it a try - I am now inclined to believe
that GNU/Linux is actually a lot more mature than Solaris, which is older -
it used to be called SunOS in a past long gone.

Aragorn wrote:

Secondly, there's Java. To Sun Microsystems, Java is the "end-all and
do-all" for everything. They even already have a desktop environment
written entirely in Java.

Ain't that true for most companies to think that their products are so
much better than anything else...

Didn't Sun ditch that Javadesktop a couple of years ago? It wasn't any
fast one, even if it had some nice features as putting notes on the
backside of the applications window.

I think the maturity of SunOS may lay on a completely on a different
level than Linux, which is a lot more user friendly and normal end users
hasn't been what Solaris have had, but servers locked down in a server
hall with a Sun educated admin, so there haven't been the need to have
easy to use operating system.

I wouldn't be surprised if the community version will grow more Linux
like, but that will take time and keep the masses from choosing
opensolaris.

On Friday 04 July 2008 07:28, someone who identifies as *J.O. Aho* wrote
in /alt.os.linux.gentoo:/

I think the maturity of SunOS may lay on a completely on a different
level than Linux, which is a lot more user friendly and normal end users
hasn't been what Solaris have had, but servers locked down in a server
hall with a Sun educated admin, so there haven't been the need to have
easy to use operating system.

I wouldn't be surprised if the community version will grow more Linux
like, but that will take time and keep the masses from choosing
opensolaris.

Hmm... I think it's the old Cathedral vs. Bazar debate, and something tells
me that Sun isn't going to let go of their control. They embrace the bazar
people to help further develop their operating system, but they're
not /giving/ their operating system to the bazar.

For them it's just another cheap way to devote resources to the development
of Solaris. Open Source programmers jumping on the OpenSolaris bandwagon
don't need to be enlisted on Sun's payroll...

At the moment I wonder if I should order a mATX board and a CPU and
ditch the whole thought of Xen, wondering if I can somehow run two
instances of X which are visible at the same time (without switching VT).

On Saturday 05 July 2008 21:03, someone who identifies as *J.O. Aho* wrote
in /alt.os.linux.gentoo:/

At the moment I wonder if I should order a mATX board and a CPU and
ditch the whole thought of Xen, wondering if I can somehow run two
instances of X which are visible at the same time (without switching VT).

This is possible if you have two monitors and at least one videocard with
two connectors. However, you still *would* need to switch virtual
terminals for input, unless you've got two keyboards and two mice, but that
would make it very, very complicated...

The idea was to have to graphics cards, each dedicated to it's own
instance of X (sharing a graphics card makes it so slow) and for one
instance it had been enough with my old ATi Remote.

At the moment I'm back with Xen dom0 on Linux, got the 2.6.21 kernel to
boot now, i had to make a BIOS change and make the SATA to work with
AHCI.

At the moment the nic isn't working, I may have to back port sky2
driver from 2.6.22, another trouble I have is the keyboard, don't seem
to work, I'll test with a PS/2 one too before taking more look at the
options I have selected. At least something going in the right direction.

On Sunday 06 July 2008 19:36, someone who identifies as *J.O. Aho* wrote
in /alt.os.linux.gentoo:/

The idea was to have to graphics cards, each dedicated to it's own
instance of X (sharing a graphics card makes it so slow) and for one
instance it had been enough with my old ATi Remote.

That is possible, yes. However, be advised that you'll probably want to
have a videocard dedicated to /dom0,/ in order to see boot-up and shutdown
messages.

I wouldn't advise running X inside /dom0./ You'd be introducing a stability
hazard - i.e. a proprietary video driver - to the controller/driver domain,
and if it gives you trouble, it'll take down all /domU/ virtual machines
with it.

At the moment I'm back with Xen dom0 on Linux, got the 2.6.21 kernel to
boot now, i had to make a BIOS change and make the SATA to work with
AHCI.

Make sure you have PCI passthrough enabled in the /dom0/ kernel, under the
Xen options...

At the moment the nic isn't working, I may have to back port sky2
driver from 2.6.22,

another trouble I have is the keyboard, don't seem
to work, I'll test with a PS/2 one too before taking more look at the
options I have selected. At least something going in the right direction.

Well, I try to stay away from USB for HID anyway. I do have a Logitech
cordless mouse - MX-1000, I believe - but it's plugged into the PS/2 mouse
port, and the keyboard is PS/2 too. In my humble opinion, that's not what
USB was invented for, and I can think of far better use for my USB
ports.

Aragorn wrote:

I wouldn't advise running X inside /dom0./ You'd be introducing a
stability hazard - i.e. a proprietary video driver - to the
controller/driver domain, and if it gives you trouble, it'll take down
all /domU/ virtual machines with it.

The idea above was for a xenless setup, for the xen environment I have 3
graphics cards, one for dom0 (console only), one for the desktop domU
and yet another for mediapalyer domU.

The funny thing with dom0 is that the cursor is misplaced, it's 4-5
positions to the left, which makes it a bit difficult to edit, at the
moment I ssh to the machine, which makes it a lot easier.

At the moment I'm back with Xen dom0 on Linux, got the 2.6.21 kernel to
boot now, i had to make a BIOS change and make the SATA to work with
AHCI.

Make sure you have PCI passthrough enabled in the /dom0/ kernel, under
the Xen options... ;-)

I did select Virtual PCI, which supposed to work, just
renaming/numbering the the exported devices.

At the moment the nic isn't working, I may have to back port sky2
driver from 2.6.22,

It turned out it was working, just that the firewire got to become the
eth0 for some reason, which made the nic to become eth1/eth2 and
wouldn't work as I had configured only eth0.

Well, I try to stay away from USB for HID anyway. I do have a Logitech
cordless mouse - MX-1000, I believe - but it's plugged into the PS/2
mouse port, and the keyboard is PS/2 too. In my humble opinion, that's
not what USB was invented for, and I can think of far better use for my
USB ports. ;-)

Nowadays there are so many USB ports that one don't know what to do with
all of them, think I have 10 on this machine and I'm used to have only
6, to have a keyboard to the desktop and one for the dom0, I will need
one setup to go with USB.

On Tuesday 08 July 2008 06:45, someone who identifies as *J.O. Aho* wrote
in /alt.os.linux.gentoo:/

Aragorn wrote:

I wouldn't advise running X inside /dom0./ You'd be introducing a
stability hazard - i.e. a proprietary video driver - to the
controller/driver domain, and if it gives you trouble, it'll take down
all /domU/ virtual machines with it.
The idea above was for a xenless setup, for the xen environment I have 3
graphics cards, one for dom0 (console only), one for the desktop domU
and yet another for mediapalyer domU.

Do you run X inside /dom0?/

The funny thing with dom0 is that the cursor is misplaced, it's 4-5
positions to the left, which makes it a bit difficult to edit, at the
moment I ssh to the machine, which makes it a lot easier.

Is this in X or in a character mode console?

Make sure you have PCI passthrough enabled in the /dom0/ kernel, under
the Xen options...
I did select Virtual PCI, which supposed to work, just
renaming/numbering the the exported devices.

That is one option. I've opted for PCI passthrough on my preliminary
set-up, although I haven't actually tried that out yet. Just configured
and built the kernels, but haven't even gotten around to making the system
bootable yet.

At the moment the nic isn't working, I may have to back port sky2
driver from 2.6.22,
It turned out it was working, just that the firewire got to become the
eth0 for some reason, which made the nic to become eth1/eth2 and
wouldn't work as I had configured only eth0.

That's bizarre, and good to know as well, given that I also have Firewire on
that machine.

Well, I try to stay away from USB for HID anyway. I do have a Logitech
cordless mouse - MX-1000, I believe - but it's plugged into the PS/2
mouse port, and the keyboard is PS/2 too. In my humble opinion, that's
not what USB was invented for, and I can think of far better use for my
USB ports.
Nowadays there are so many USB ports that one don't know what to do with
all of them, think I have 10 on this machine and I'm used to have only
6, to have a keyboard to the desktop and one for the dom0, I will need
one setup to go with USB.

From what I've read on one of the forums, such a set-up would work in theory
but not in practice. Someone reported a dual-seat set-up like that on a
Xen machine, one virtual machine - presumably /dom0/ - set up with the PS/2
keyboard and mouse, and a /domU/ virtual machine with a dedicated videocard
and dedicated USB keyboard and mouse.

In addition, it seems that with Xen 3.x, one needs to dedicate an entire USB
hub to /domU,/ whereas in Xen 2.x it was still possible to dedicate
individual USB ports to /domU./

Your mileage may of course vary. I'm just reporting on some of the things
I've read. :-)

I saw something about that too, but don't believe it until you have