Getting started with Kubuntu
The Ultra 40 that I won arrived on Wednesday, but I’ve been too busy since then to do much with it until now.
I have spent a little bit of time carrying out some research. My initial plan was to triple boot this server. First as a FreeBSD machine — it’s my preferred Unix flavour, my other Unix boxes run FreeBSD, and it gives me the opportunity to carry out FreeBSD testing on a 64 bit platform.
Then with Solaris 10. I want to carry on the work that I’ve already started with DTrace, and get some more experience with other Solaris technologies.
Finally, as a Windows XP box. Two reasons for this. First, Photoshop. I take quite a lot of pictures, and, not currently having a Dual Core Mac to hand, Photoshop on XP is my preferred image editing system. I also have something of a workflow built around it. The other reason is games. I don’t get much opportunity, but when it arises I can quite happily while away the time playing Half Life 2.
That’s not quite what happened.
Day 59 of 60: Final thoughts
This system will be going back to Sun soon, while I wait to find out whether or not they’ve decided to grant me the system. In the meantime, here are some final thoughts on the last 59 days.
Day 59 of 60: Developer benchmarks (pt 4)
Yesterday’s tests show that using gcc on both FreeBSD and Solaris yields a marked improvement in the time taken to compile Perl.
However, despite the big difference in compile times, the run-times of Perl’s test suite aren’t dramatically affected. The worst performer, Perl running on Solaris, compiled with Sun’s cc and optimisation is 6% slower than the best performer, Perl running on FreeBSD, compiled with gcc and optimisation. This test involved a great deal of IO and process creation, and I thought that that might be part of the reason for the differences. So I’ve been using a Perl based application, SpamAssassin, to test whether or not there are big differences between the run times of the various Perl interpreters.
Day 58 of 60: Developer benchmarks (pt 3)
Yesterday I looked at performance compiling Sendmail on Solaris and FreeBSD using Sun’s compiler (on Solaris) and gcc (on both systems).
In the tests gcc come out handily ahead, with gcc on FreeBSD being 16% faster than gcc on Solaris with low optimisation options, and 12% faster than gcc on Solaris with optimisation turned on. Sun’s compiler was over twice as slow as gcc on either system.
Today I’ve been looking at the time taken to compile Perl on both systems, using both compilers, with and without optimisation.
Day 57 of 60: Developer benchmarks (pt 2)
As I explained on day 55, I’ve been comparing GCC and the Sun Studio compiler on Solaris, to GCC running on FreeBSD to see if there are any significant differences in the time taken to compile the applications, and if there is, whether that difference is reflected in the time taken by the applications to run. I used gcc 3.4.3 on both systems.
Day 55 of 60: Developer benchmarks (pt 1)
The last week has been quite busy with work that’s not related to this project. Mindful that the 60 day time limit is almost up, and aware that I’ve not done any actual benchmarking of this workstation — vis a vis “How does Solaris on this hardware compare against another OS on this system?”, I’ve started doing some investigation.
Sun bill this machine as a developer workstation, so I thought I’d look at how speedy it is at carrying out tasks that developers do. I also thought it would be worthwhile carrying out a few performance benchmarks relating to a real-world application that I currently run on Solaris.
Day 16 of 60: Reinstall
I’ve just had to carry out a complete reinstall of the OS, which was uncommonly tedious.
Day 14 of 60: Minor updates
I’ve been a bit busy with other work over the past few days, and haven’t made quite as much progress as I’d like.
There are a few things that have moved forward though.
Day 5 of 60: Building test zones
I’ve spent a bit of time today preparing some zones that I’ll be using for testing my changes to Sendmail.
Day 4 of 60: Sendmail first build
It’s not much of a milestone, but spent five minutes getting Sendmail to build on Solaris 10 with the Sun Studio 11 compiler.
Day 4 of 60: The learning zone
One of the new features that Solaris 10 has that I’m interested in is zones. A zone is lightweight virtualisation environment. Unlike VMWare, or Xen, the whole environment is not virtualised. You still have one running OS kernel which arbitrates access to the hardware, for example. A zone is more like a separate instance of the userland, with its own IP address, users, running processes, and so on.
In this respect Solaris Zones are very similar to FreeBSD Jails, and if I was going to sum it up I might call it “chroot on steroids, with a much better management interface.”
I’m quite familiar with FreeBSD’s Jail system, much less so with Zones. I’ve offered up a Zone to some of the pkgsrc developers so they can experiment with pkgsrc on Solaris 10, and I’m planning on using Zones for testing the changes that I’ll be making to Sendmail, so I need to learn how to create and manage them.
Day 2 of 60: SSH agent authentication
I’ve just configured the desktop to prompt me for my SSH credentials once, instead of on every connection, using ssh-agent and an X11 SSH password requestor.
This is bread-and-butter stuff that should be easy, made a little more complex by documentation not being accessible on the Sun site. Since I couldn’t find the correct incantation through Google I’m documenting it here
Day 1 of 60: Fun and games with pkgsrc
In the years that I’ve been using Solaris it’s support for third party packages has, to my mind, always let it down. The open source community writes and releases software at a phenomenal rate, and systems like FreeBSD and Linux have developed a number of interesting ways to make it as easy as possible to get this software, install it, and (much more importantly) manage it once it’s been installed.
Day 1 of 60: Tourist
I’ve spent a bit of time poking around the workstation and Solaris 10. I feel like a tourist in a Western European city. Everything’s pretty familiar — the roadsigns all look the same (although the font might be a bit different, and the speeds are marked in kph not mph) but there are things everywhere that remind you that you’re not quite home.
Day 1 of 60: First boot
After a few phone calls along the way to find out where it had got to, the workstation arrived today a little after midday. I was greeted with two large boxes, one containing the machine itself, the other containing a far smaller box with the keyboard and mouse. As a friend has already remarked, there’s a certain something about new computer smell.
raison d’être
It started when I read a number of posts at Jonathan Schwartz’s blog (in order: here, here, here, here, and here).
Jonathan is Sun’s CEO (although he wasn’t at the time he started this series). The essence of it is that Sun are so stoked about their new hardware that:
So… here’s an invitation to developers and customers that don’t want to move to Solaris, want to stay on GNU/Linux, but still want to take advantage of Niagara’s (or our Galaxy system’s) energy efficiency - click here, we’ll send you a Niagara or Galaxy system, free. Write a thorough*, public review (good or bad - we just care about the fidelity/integrity of what’s written - to repeat, it can be a good review, or a poor review), we’ll let you keep the system. Free.
That sounds like a good deal to me. So I started thinking about how I might take advantage of this offer.