BeleniX 0.8 Alpha using Network Installer

There is an Alpha release of BeleniX 0.8 available that can be installed directly off the package repo via a network installer. There is no LiveCD release yet, that will come later. The network installer can be used if you are already using OpenSolaris 2009.xx or BeleniX 0.7.1. It will install 0.8 Alpha into a new boot environment leaving your current BE untouched. While booting you will get a GRUB menu option to boot into this environment.

The following simple steps are needed to use the network installer:

wget http://www.belenix.org/binfiles/install_belenix

chmod +x ../install_belenix

./install_belenix

You can run ‘install_belenix -help’ to get a detailed usage guide. The installer downloads approx 830+ packages. This release provides lots of updates to packages and new packages built mostly using Gcc 4.4.0. As a matter of direction BeleniX is moving to using Gcc 4.4 as the default compiler except for the OpenSolaris base OS itself. An open-source toolchain is preferable, it is easier to port FOSS stuff to OpenSolaris when using Gcc and Gcc 4.x series are introducing lots of good features.

This 0.8 Alpha consists of a complete KDE 4.2.4 base environment, with most packages from the extragear repo. Amarok2, Qt4 built using Gcc-Graphite, Webkit, Google Gadgets, PDO optimized Python 2.6, Gtk-Qt4 engine, Gcc 4.4 with the Graphite framework, X11 framework built using XCB support, BOOST (which is required for KDE4 anyway), Boost-Python, PyQt4, DJVU document support, MySQL 5.1, XULRunner and so on and also includes a complete GNOME 2.26 environment based off the JDS repository with modifications. More packages will keep appearing over the next several weeks.

ALPHA – ALERT: This is an Alpha release so things may not work or horribly crash in the new boot environment though we are seeing the KDE 4 desktop to be usable. So feedback and bug reports are welcome. Your existing boot environment is of course left untouched.

 

Digital Battles Today

For years we have had stories and novels about battles being fought in a digital virtual world. Some notable examples include Tron, The Matrix Trilogy, Star Trek: A Taste of Armageddon etc. I fondly remember transfixedly watching Tron at the American Center Library in Kolkata and the Star Trek episode earlier to that while I was in high-school hacking on the BBC Microcomputers and IBM PC-ATs. In another instance many would have read A.K. Dewdney’s glorious Armchair Universe which among many things details computer programs fighting each other, the beginnings of computer viruses.

Anyway but all these are either for fun, fiction or malice. However imagine an entire industry humming on using some of these concepts in practice and raking in major buck – and this is not in the computer industry, not the antivirus people. This is the Financial industry, the world of high-frequency trading. Automated trading software using the latest in digital wizardry, mathematics and devious algorithms pitting their electron-soaked brains in titanic microsecond battles to rake in that extra trade, that extra moolah. The fortunes get built in the financial markets of the world and the current state of the computer art get exploited to their limits generating ample bucks and ample controversies in their wake. Some tidbits:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/-it-sounds-like-something.ars

http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/aug2009/pi2009087_065398.htm

 

Gnome 2.26 on BeleniX

Apart from KDE4, Gnome 2.26 will also be available in BeleniX 0.8. I pulled the Desktop Consolidation trunk (JDS) and built it with a bunch of changes. The packages are already available in the package repository trunk but not yet recommended to upgrade to trunk as it is seeing a lot of churn at present. One of the things pending is to replace the default OpenSolaris branding with BeleniX branding. Below is a screenshot showing Gnome 2.26 + Compiz + Avant + Google Gadgets + Webkit on my box. The Gnome developer help documentation browser is built with Webkit support.

 

KDE 4.2.4 – Getting there

I have been heads down busy getting KDE 4.2.4 to build on BeleniX with Gcc 4.4. I recently completed kdebindings and kdebase and had enough to get a KDE4 desktop started. Since I am doing chrooted builds in an alternate boot environment, all I had to do was to reboot into that BE and issue ‘xinit startkde’. Here is a hurried digicam picture after running my first KDE4 desktop (actual screenshots will come later):

 

Func on OpenSolaris

Func or Fedora Unified Network Contrtoller is a Fedora project that introduces a new framework to easily and securely control one or more machines remotely using either a programmatic or cli interface: https://fedorahosted.org/func/

Func is a lightweight but IMHO well-designed framework written entirely in Python. From my initial experience it is extremely powerful and it’s modular nature allows for easy extensibility for a wide variety of tasks. You can not only execute commands remotely but can develop custom modules to return information from the remote machine in a structured way. Check out the website for all the interesting details.

Being written in pure Python Func is also inherently portable. The few Linux-isms reside in the startup init scripts. Having found a sudden interest in the project I decided to make Func work on OpenSolaris and happy to note that I have an initial version that works and provides a few basic extension modules for ZFS, SMF and process info. You can download and install the packages in the below order:

http://www.belenix.org/binfiles/python25-pyopenssl.pkg
http://www.belenix.org/binfiles/certmaster.pkg
http://www.belenix.org/binfiles/func.pkg

You also need to have the SUNWPython25 package. There is a little bit of initial setting up to be done as described in /usr/share/doc/func/README.opensolaris. This initial port, provides SMF manifests and startup scripts for func agent and certmaster, usage of a func daemon user and RBAC profile, a basic set of opensolaris modules (http://www.belenix.org/binfiles/func-opensolaris-modules-0.1.tar.gz)  and a proof of concept integration with Solaris RBAC Authorization framework. I have written a simple Python interface to libsecdb that exposes the chkauthattr function in Python. While Func itself has an ACL mechanism that allows the client to controls access to modules by the master it should be worthwhile to integrate that mechanism with the RBAC authorization framework on OpenSolaris. This will allow network-wide Func user privilege setting.

The Func packages will be available in the BeleniX repo. In the meanwhile I have submitted the initial port into Sourcejuicer for the /contrib repo. Going forward there are lots of things to be done including possibly having OpenSymbolic to run on BeleniX. One of the things that are at present not easily done on Func is streaming monitoring information from client to server, for eg. streaming the ouptut of a running DTrace script. Since Func communications are encrypted it is possible, as a simple mechanism, to distribute one-time/short-lived symmetric keys and set up a second TCP connection for streaming data. This can also be done for remotely effecting a ZFS send/receive between two clients (or minions in Func parlance).

 

Gcc 4.4.0 in BeleniX

Gcc 4.4.0 release is now available in BeleniX package repository trunk at pkg.belenix.org. It built without issues out of the box and as a test I was able to build BOOST 1.38.1 and a patched Qt4 (From the KDE Solaris project) without any trouble using this new compiler.
You can pull the latest SFEgcc package using spkg from BeleniX trunk.

Update: I forgot to mention that the updated Gcc spec file is here. The spec file is setup to build Gcc using SUN Studio 12. In generall the BeleniX spec files can be found here.

Update 2: I rebuilt Gcc 4.4 with the ClooG and Ppl dependencies so that the new Graphite framework is enabled. I played around with the various flags in trying to build Python 2.6 and got very good results vis-a-vis SUN Studio 12. I got comparable or better results using Pybench esp. in 64Bit mode with Gcc4 compiled Python 2.6. In adition I tried the new ‘profile-opt’ make target in Python 2.6 that does profile-driven optimization with Gcc. The 64Bit python binary built using Gcc4 + loop optimizations and Profile is 27% faster than the 64Bit SS12 built binary (without profile opt). The 32Bit binary is about 2% faster. Using loop parallelization via OpenMP might have helped further but 32Bit Python dumps core when built with -ftree-parallelize-loops=2 -march=pentium4.

If you are using another OpenSolaris distro and still want to try out this new Gcc 4.4 you can try running this little script to download and install SFEgcc and it’s dependency packages from the BeleniX repo. Be warned that I have not actually tested the script. All the spec files can be found in BeleniX sourceforge repo.

 

A Magnum Opus on OpenSolaris

I recently received my complimentary copy of “OpenSolaris Bible” thanks to Wiley. I have been identified as one of the contributors as I helped review content for Chapter 2. There are good write-ups on the various OpenSolaris distributions and I am happy to note the nice stuff written about BeleniX.

This is one massive piece of work no doubt apparent from the bulk of the book itself. I have been leafing through the pages and found this to be an invaluable reference for my day to day work. The text is detailed and lucid with lots of good examples. I found the little “Cross-Ref” entries to be very helpful. These direct the reader to related content in other chapters – probably the closest that one can come to hyperlinks in printed content, but at the same time a fair bit more detailed than simple hyperlinks.
I’d recommend anyone using or working on OpenSolaris to grab a copy of this very definitive reference.

 

“Redemption ARK” – A Thriller

Just finished reading “Redemption ARK” by Alastair Reynolds. An excellent highly recommended Sci-Fi novel. It keeps the reader glued to the pages all throughout with it’s fast paced events and sudden changes in action. I spent several late nights essentially gobbling up the book never being bored by a single paragraph.

One of the best things about this novel is that it’s author is also a scientist by profession. This means that all the explanations about cosmic happenings and advanced technology are grounded on actual theoretical basis. The explanations were lucid and highly interesting though can be a little tricky to grasp for a layman.

Having said all this, there are a couple of things that I’d like to complain of. One, the so called hell-class doomsday weapons forming a primary thread of the storyline. The author’s description of the weapons in action lacks depth and detail. They seem to be less of doomsday stuff even compared to a nuclear warhead of today. Their action against the inhibitor machinery are not described much leaving the reader to wonder what is happening, how much damage etc. The conclusion to the novel also is a little of a let-down after the fantastic and furious journey till just before the end. It is a kind of an anti-climax leaving the reader not fully satisfied at the end. These shortcomings are but small kinks on an otherwise spotless surface. I highly recommend SF addicts to get their paws on this novel.

 

Lost Opportunity ?

This interesting piece of news caught my attention: http://www.dishtracking.com/forum/bharti-airtel-launches-worlds-first-windows-based-online-t-2667.html

Utility computing being brought to the masses. It still remains to be seen how this plays out. SUN has been talking about utility computing for so long but …. SUN should have been a part of the above announcement, unfortunately it is not. Lost opportunity I’d say.

 

Defaulters to be sucked dry

A couple of days back I came across this pieces of news: Defaulting credit cards will attract 49% interest now. Wow, that is one hell of a penal interest. In addition it has the blessings of the Supreme Court. Will all due respect it pains me to fathom how the court could have allowed such an atrocious interest rate even though it was a no-show from the defendant NGO body. Given bad times now with people losing jobs, the really unfortunate ones will now have the banks hot on their trail sucking them dry.

The most interesting part of this news item is this little jewel:

“Even the cost of acquiring a new customer, that is the cost of calls made randomly by authorised call centres urging people to take credit cards, is also taken into account for realisation through charging of penal interest from a defaulting card holder.”

First they harass us over phone with unwarranted calls, then they bring down the world economy  and then they harass the unfortunate ones to recover the costs they incurred during the earlier unwarranted harassment cycle, to help survive the economic mess they created! Sweet.