When Oracle, while trying to win people’s hearts and minds while the European Union and US Justice Department considered the merger, said “[Oracle plans to] Spend more money developing Solaris than Sun does now” it seems they meant just that; spend more developing Solaris while killing OSOL.

So obviously that is it for OpenSolaris. A community has sprung up in the Illumos project to continue it, but OpenSolaris will stop at version 2009.06. The current /dev version, which was supposed to be 2010.02 (and was pushed forward to 2010.03 before Oracle stopped talking about it completely) cannot be released as a swansong because it contains critical bugs that Oracle won’t spend the time or money fixing.

And that’s that. My workarounds post won’t be updated any more, since there is nothing to workaround. The hits on that post from people searching OSOL error messages have already dropped down to barely anything anyway.

So what OS do I recommend switching to now that OSOL is dead? Windows 7. Yes, really.
What OS for development? Archlinux or FreeBSD.

ld: fatal: file /opt/sunstudio12.1/prod/lib/crti.o: section .rela.annotate has invalid type [ SHT_RELA ]
ld is trying to do 64-bit linking on a non-64 bit system, do export LD_NOEXEC_64=1 and retry the compile.

readline warning turning off output flushing
This is a bug triggered by an upgrade from the 2009.06 stable to certain dev versions. Add clone:ptmx 0666 root sys to /etc/minor_perm

Broken keyboard layout, SHIFT+2 produces ” and SHIFT+’ produces @ (among other oddities)
This is most probably Acer Extensa 5620Z specific but pressing Fn+I fixes it. (Left size of Extensa keyboard: [CTRL][Fn][WIN][ALT])

More a tip than a workaround:

Update system
2009.06 has some very outdated packages and some important packages are not available in its /release repo. Complete upgrade:
pfexec pkg set-publisher -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev opensolaris.org
pfexec pkg image-update

Will update if I run into any other issues or think of anything I’ve missed.

Update: 26/12/09:

The snapshot manager service has been placed offline due to a dependency problem

This message is displayed when trying open the Time Slider GUI interface. Look at the processes it lists, they will look something like:

maintenance svc:/system/filesystem/zfs/auto-snapshot:frequent
maintenance svc:/system/filesystem/zfs/auto-snapshot:daily

For each one run pfexec svcadm clear svc:/system/filesystem/zfs/auto-snapshot:TIMEPERIOD

So in my example, run:

pfexec svcadm clear svc:/system/filesystem/zfs/auto-snapshot:frequent
pfexec svcadm clear svc:/system/filesystem/zfs/auto-snapshot:daily

Start, restart, stop apache

Slipped my mind to mention this earlier, this is a bit unintuitive for Debian-people used to /etc/init.d/apache2

pfexec svcadm COMMAND http:apache22

Examples:

pfexec svcadm start http:apache22
pfexec svcadm restart http:apache22
pfexec svcadm stop http:apache22

Useless boot environment images

Another one that slipped my mind. pkg image-update creates new boot environments, assuming you don’t need the old images and want the diskspace back:

pfexec beadm destroy BENAME

Example:

pfexec beadm destroy opensolaris-1

View ZFS snapshots and their disk-usage

I tend to get paranoid as to how much space my ZFS auto-snapshots are using:

zfs list -t snapshot

Update: 11/01/10

Package ‘xrender’, required by ‘cairo’, not found

You get this if you when requesting details of GTK libs via pkg-config, eg. pkg-config --libs gtkmm-2.4. You need xorg-headers; pfexec pkg install SUNWxorg-headers. You will get this error trying to install Gtk2 for Perl.

Update: 21/06/2010

OpenSolaris continuously restarts while booting

This is an issue caused by updating to the current /dev revision. If you boot in graphical mode, the orange loading bar will appear for a few seconds, the machine will then restart, get back to the orange loading bar and restart again. This will continue ad infinitum.
Fixing it is simple, thanks to ZFS and multiple boot environments.

I did this from a straight upgrade from 2009.06 to /dev 134. My broken /dev boot environment was called opensolaris-1.

Boot into your last working boot environment, in my case this was OpenSolaris 2009.06

Run the following commands:

pfexec beadm mount opensolaris-1 /mnt
pfexec bootadm update-archive -F -R /mnt
pfexec beadm unmount opensolaris-1

Be sure to replace opensolaris-1 with the name of the broken boot environment. If you have gone straight from a fresh install of 2009.06 to the latest dev it will be called opensolaris-1, however if you have done other image-updates previously it may be opensolaris-2 or opensolaris-3 etc. (or if you give your boot environments custom names, something completely different).

It can be opened via the command ddu or, for the terminally-challenged, Applications -> System Tools -> Device Driver Utility.

This clever program informed me that this box used an “Intel 82801 DB PRO/100 VM” and that a third-party driver was required. Right-clicking on the Network card and selecting “Show details” brings up a dialogue which includes a URL pointing to the driver you need. In this case it can be found here. You want the latest “ife driver for intel”, it lists 8255x cards but rest assured that it works with the 82801.

Luckily OSOL detected my USB drive by default, as needing network connectivity to get network connectivity is one of the more frustrating computer paradoxes. It would be nice if it shipped with the driver needed but I assume there are copyright restrictions on it.

Installing it is easy; extract the archive, open a terminal in the directory and run pfexec make install. Restart and voila, network access. Now if I could just get domain names to resolve …

Update: To get domain names resolving I added OpenDNS’ address(es) to my /etc/resolv.conf. The default was what every other machine on my network uses and they work fine, so I’m not sure if it’s an OSOL problem, a hardware problem or a PEBCAR problem (Problem exists between computer and router).