OT: Comparison of Unix systems and window managers

That doesn't look at all like the version of FVWM2 I installed, and at a quick look, I couldn't find any option in the menus for customising its appearance.

You make a lot from Google AdSense :-).

Chris

Thanks for the warning.

I guess I'm a bit of a perfectionist. If I store the main content in the database, I would want some kind of content management system for editing and uploading new material, and that would be a lot of work.

For content which doesn't change often, manually-edited HTML files seem okay to me.

Chris

You do so by editing .fvwm2rc. I can help and there are tons of examples floating around.

i

Aargh. That looks like a lot of work!

I guess this is perhaps where I'm not quite a Unix purist. I like ease of configuration offered by a GUI sometimes :-).

I might try configuring FVWM2 another night, but not tonight. I'll get back to you if I need any help.

Best wishes,

Chris

According to Dave Hinz :

A decade or so old, but not that bad, if you don't need interface cards which are only available in PCI format. (That is the main complaint that I have about the Ultra-2.

In particular, I would suggest moving to a Sun Blade 2000 (but be prepared to need Fibre Channel disk drives for the boot drives -- though you *can* boot from SCSI drives in a Multipack. I did that before I got my Fibre Channel drives for my Sun Fire 280R.

Hmm ... useful to consider -- as long as it will work without loading conflicting versions of GNU libs.

I'm running two Ultra-60s on Solaris 10 U3, and for the most part they are Ultra-2s with PCI slots instead of SBus slots. The CPUs are 450 MHz instead of the maximum 400 MHz for the Ultra-2, but otherwise they are quite similar. Same SIMMs, same maximum of 2GB of RAM, same two internal SCA drives, same internal CD-ROM, floppy (with room for another 3.5" drive -- perhaps a DAT tape drive.

Anyway -- Solaris 10 U3 is not bad at all on the Ultra-60 (and I would probably still be using the Ultra-2 (with Solaris 10 U2) if I had not needed a PCI slot to allow me to talk to LVD devices.

Oh yes -- one other advantage to the Ultra-60 (and other PCI-based systems) -- I have stuck a cheap USB 2.0 PCI card (from Microcenter for about $18.00) in it, and Solaris 10 happily recognized it. I'm currently using it for:

1) Logitech optical trackball (better than a mouse on the arm of my Lay-Z-Boy chair). 2) Card reader so I can read the CF cards from my Nikon D70 digital SLR (though I can also read those with a SCSI interfaced PCMCIA reader, plus a PCMCIA to CF adaptor card. 3) USB thumb drives, for moving more than a floppy's worth of data between computers which are not networked, such as the Windows 2K box when I need to do income tax work.

Be sure to *not* install the Gnome package from the Solaris 10 DVD set as well, or you may have conflicts of program versions. There is gnome stuff both in /usr/sfw/bin (which thus came from the main install DVD), and in /opt/sfw/bin (which thus came from the software companion DVD or CD).

To be *sure* -- type "pkginfo | grep -i 'gnome'"

On my Ultra-60, I get 265 entries with the "i-" option to grep, and 225 entries without it. So -- there may be quite a bit to remove, depending on what you have installed.

Note that one difference between the earlier versions of Solaris and Solaris 10 is that Solaris 10 does not actually use /etc/inetd.conf. Instead, you use "svcs -a" to find out what is there, and "svcadm" to turn things on and off -- no "kill -HUP after editing the file.

Some entries in /etc/init.d actually invoke "svcadm" to make the changes. For example, look at "/etc/init.d/volmgt".

/etc/inetd.conf does still exist, but it is mostly:

====================================================================== # Legacy configuration file for inetd(1M). See inetd.conf(4). # # This file is no longer directly used to configure inetd. # The Solaris services which were formerly configured using this file # are now configured in the Service Management Facility (see smf(5)) # using inetadm(1M). # # Any records remaining in this file after installation or upgrade, # or later created by installing additional software, must be converted # to smf(5) services and imported into the smf repository using # inetconv(1M), otherwise the service will not be available. Once # a service has been converted using inetconv, further changes made to # its entry here are not reflected in the service. ======================================================================

[ ... ]

It particularly bothered me, because I used the *original* OS-9 from Microware. A nice multi-user multi-tasking OS which was quite happy in a mere 64k of RAM (or actually -- 56k of RAM, and 4K of EPROM, and the rest of the gap used for I/O space.

Every process was position independent and reentrant, so it could run without memory management -- though there was a Level-2 version which did use memory management, and handle up to 2MB of RAM, IIRC.

Of course, I used it before I used unix (v7) and if they had been tried in the other order, I might have been less pleased. But for an OS running on an 8-bit CPU (the Motorola 6809), it did quite well -- especially when compared to the original IBM-PC, which came out a bit later, and had a much larger possible address space. :-)

Also -- zfs is a very nice (and well-integrated) version of RAID -- a lot easier to administer than the earlier versions under Solaris.

Or run Solaris 10 on a good fast UltraSPARC system.

Well ... my Sun Fire 280R was $250.00 with 4GB of RAM, and the OS (Solaris 10) was free. :-)

O.K.

My two Ultra-2s were retired within the past year -- replaced with Ultra-60s, and then the Sun Fire 280R replaced *several* SS-10 and SS-10 machines. :-)

I keep being tempted to pick up a Mac for the Income Tax software. For the rest, I am happy with my mix of Solaris 10, Solaris

2.6, and several versions of OpenBSD.

Enjoy, DoN.

Then you could check out fvwm-themes.

It is good, I stuck with the same config for 12 years, with some changes, but not much. Used themes at some oipnt and also tried gnome-wm.

i

According to Christopher Tidy :

Interesting that the system board date is unset in the Ultra-60:

system-board-date: data not available.

and the variable does not even exist in the Sun Fire 280R. (Nor does anything with the word "date" in it.

What framebuffer do you have in your Ultra-2? I ran the latest available Creator-3D in it, as I do in my Ultra-60s now.

O.K. Other than filling out the RAM to the full 2GB. For many things, that does not matter, but if the GIMP is important to you, you want both as much physical RAM, and as much swap space as possible. Note that the GIMP (at least version 2.0.2) can accept a disk partition to use for its own private swap space, and I've given that to mine. IIRC, it asked for it when the version first was started.

(Maybe) slightly faster CPUs, but only one per system, slower disks (IDE) but you can put in two 120 GB disks for relatively little money. (They can't use larger than something like 137 GB, IIRC -- they'll ignore any extra if you put a larger disk in -- and this is a limitation of the hardware of the disk interface, not the driver in the OS, so you can't fix that. CPU speeds can go up to 440 MHz, and down as far as 270 MHz.

RAM -- only four DIMMs -- limited to smaller ones for the Ultra-5, even though they both have the same system board -- the problem being clearance for the taller DIMMs under the floppy drive IIRC.

O.K. DIMMs are either *only* 16MB DIMMs in all occupied slots, or a mix of 32, 64, 128, or 256MB DIMMS (in pairs) in the Ultra-10 , or all but the 256 MB ones in the Ultra-5. You've got a choice of 60nS or

50 nS DIMMS, and if they are mixed, they will all be treated as 60 nS.

Ultra 5 is stuck with the built-in framebuffer, or a PCI one of appropriate type. Ultra-10 has more room in the case (thus taller DIMMs, and the possibility of a Creator-3D or Elite-3D board in a UPA1 graphics slot.

Note that even the Ultra-10 is a lot lighter than the Ultra-2. I've lifted enough of both so I can be sure of this. :-) But shipping could *still* be exorbitant. :-)

Well ... at least add more RAM. Note that the same DIMMs can be used in the Ultra-60 if you opt to upgrade.

O.K. I've never liked what Windows looked like. I prefer to do most things (other than image processing) from plain xterm or dtterm windows, typing (though cutting and pasting between them at need).

Remember to strip out all of the existing Gnome packages which install from the DVD-ROM. I believe that you can leave it out totally, but run the pkginfo command to be sure before you start building.

You can play games with the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to limit what a process sees.

But note that you *cannot* build truly static packages with recent versions of Solaris. (I believe that this includes Solaris 9, but I can't check, since my last install of that was updated to Solaris

10 long ago.) The reason? Look for /usr/lib/libc.a. It isn't there. (Now, if you download the sources for Solaris 10, and compile your own, you can build it with /usr/lib/libc.a and then you can compile your own fully static code.)

I haven't used Solaris 9 for quite a while.

Well -- the one which I have (2.0.2) was included in the main install DVD-ROM (since it installed in /usr/sfw/bin, not /opt/sfw/bin where the software companion ones wind up).

And -- it is using shared libs to a large extent. Running:

ldd `which gimp`

returns 44 shared libs. This is already too large to post properly, so I won't add that -- but if you want it in private e-mail, send me a request. you can check the shared libs to see how many of them can be found in the Solaris 9 system. If you don't hit version limitations, you can put the additional shared libs (from the Solaris 10 distribution DVD) into a private lib directory for the GIMP and can quite possibly run it there.

Note that fvwm2 is included in the Software Companion DVD-ROM for Solaris 10. It can be found in /opt/sfw/bin, and ldd shows it as using only 17 shared libs most of which are in /usr/openwin/lib and /usr/lib, though there are two platform-specific ones, which on my Ultra-60 are:

/platform/SUNW,Ultra-60/lib/libc_psr.so.1 /platform/SUNW,Ultra-60/lib/libmd5_psr.so.1

In the Sun Fire 280R, instead they are:

/platform/SUNW,Sun-Fire-280R/lib/libc_psr.so.1 /platform/SUNW,Sun-Fire-280R/lib/libmd5_psr.so.1

so you will have to check for corresponding ones in your system for the Ultra-2. These are actually symlinks to the appropriate libs for the CPU. :-)

Well ... you don't have to build fvwm2 for Solaris 10, as it is in the Software Companion DVD.

Understood -- though there is enough new to learn with Solaris

10 (such as the replacement of /etc/inetd.conf with "svcs" and "svcadm".

Spares don't seem to be a problem with eBay selling spare machines dirt cheap. But eBay still leaves you with the shipping across the pond. :-)

Just keep it clear of the outside net while running Windows. I simply refuse to let my Windows 2000 Pro system touch the outside net, and have to talk to the income tax software people for a way to download the latest update files to my Suns, and then to copy them to the Windows machine.

Best of luck, DoN.

Well ... since I don't *have* one (only the permanent one on the other side), I don't really know what it looks like. I don't think that there *is* an oval in this style. It is put in with the tapes facing away from you. The magazines hit some sense switches in the ceiling of the library to tell it that they are present (or not, as happens to be the current case). The pickup arm runs along a track between the two removable magazines on the near side and the fixed one plus the (up to_ four drives on the other side. (oh yes -- there is also an import/export port to the right of the door which accesses the magazines). It also has a bar-code reader, so I set up to make my own barcode labels. Here is the tail of the output from "mtx -status" on that system (plus a few lines from the head): ====================================================================== Storage Changer /dev/scsi/changer/c3t0d0:2 Drives, 31 Slots ( 1 Import/Export ) Data Transfer Element 0:Empty Data Transfer Element 1:Full (Storage Element 28 Loaded):VolumeTag = DD-B1008 Storage Element 1:Empty

[ ... ]

Storage Element 19:Empty Storage Element 20:Empty Storage Element 21:Full :VolumeTag=DD-B1001 Storage Element 22:Full :VolumeTag=DD-B1012 Storage Element 23:Full :VolumeTag=DD-B1003 Storage Element 24:Full :VolumeTag=DD-B1004 Storage Element 25:Full :VolumeTag=DD-B1005 Storage Element 26:Full :VolumeTag=DD-B1006 Storage Element 27:Full :VolumeTag=DD-B1007 Storage Element 28:Empty Storage Element 29:Full :VolumeTag=DD-B1009 Storage Element 30:Full :VolumeTag=DD-B1022 Storage Element 31 IMPORT/EXPORT:Full :VolumeTag=CLEAN-01 ======================================================================

The tape from "Storage Element 28" is currently in "Data Transfer Element 1"

All those slots from "Storage Element 1" through "Storage element 20" are the two (non-existent) magazines.

FWIW The magazines are Exabyte part number: 1010867 (10-slot magazine)

I've got samples of two other styles of 10-slot magazines, and librarys which use one of them. The other style is simply used (by me) for storing tapes out of the dust. :-) I've also got some 7-slot magazines for the EZ-17 single-drive libraries.

They might help him. I'm using the 13W3 to VGA adaptors on several systems with LCD monitors connected. The one which I am typing at (A KDS LCD monitor) is the only one which really doesn't deal gracefully with the default 1152x900. It thinks that the closest is

1152x850, and leaves 50 lines of pixels off the bottom (or the top) of the screen. But -- once I set the system to an alternative resolution, things are fine. (For a while, I had to run with a bunch of things moved off the bottom of the screen so they remained visible. :-) [ ... ] *Nice* hardware.

Well ... the latest was because the rack which I am using (A DEC rack from the VAX period) has unthreaded rails, and I don't have enough clip-in threads, so I had to make bars with the 10-32 threaded holes at the proper spacings to allow me to clamp in the rack slides. (This sort of project makes me *really* happy that I have a Tapmatic head for my drill press. :-)

I only use emacs under duress -- but still in preference to vi. Jove I find very comfortable, with no programming language lurking in it, and I've been using that since I first compiled it on a BBN C-70 at work. (That machine did not even *have* VI -- just line editors, and it was too heavily loaded to really work well with emacs. :-)

Think of jove as "emacs lite". :-) Most of the keyboard sequences are the same, and I learned them (with jove) before I ever had access to vi. :-)

And -- jove did not have macros which could be exploited for "privilege escalation" -- unlike some earlier versions of vi.

Enjoy, DoN.

According to Rob Fraser :

You mean the 13W3? It is not dead at all. It is present in the Creator-3D PCI format cards (but not PCI connectors) for the Ultra-60 and the Ultra-10 (plus many others, but these I know for sure. Come to think of it, there are two slots for it in my Sun Fire 280R -- but the mounting for them is not present in the case. They *are* used with the same system board in the Sun Blade 2000, however. I guess that they did not want to put the system load of a fancy framebuffer on a system built as a file server.

Enjoy, DoN.

I've got the Creator-3D, same as you.

I've never found RAM at an attractive enough price to make it tempting. Because of the modules I've currently got installed, I'd have had to buy a whole 2 GB, and that was about $100, shipping included. And there didn't seem a lot of point, when Solaris Management Console said I was only using half my RAM at the most. I guess I could increase the tile cache size, but Gimp 1.2 seems fast enough. But Gimp 2.0 seems very slow, which is one reason why I dislike it. It also dumps core all the time.

I'd probably let it see the net through our ADSL router, but put Windows and Unix on separate hard drives. If Windows gets screwed up, re-install.

Best wishes,

Chris

According to Rob Fraser :

[ ... ]

O.K. Not sure whether Sun ever bundled that library with their systems. I know that I had to add some lines to /kernel/drv/st.conf to have it properly use the Mammoth-2 drives -- though the Mammoth-1 (8900) drives were already understood.

FWIW The Exabyte part number for the magazines is:

1010867 10-slot magazine

and it is not one of the earlier 10-slot magazines -- I have examples of two of those, and they are far from what is needed.

Thanks!

[ ... ]

O.K. I can understand that.

Sounds like a good way to keep the house warm. (Or to seriously run up the air conditioning bill -- which I already have too much experience with. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

I don't think anyone actually manufactures a device including 13W3 today, though, do they?

Chris

I'm also interested to see that you've used some tables for layout on the site. I'm using tables for layout on my site, but CSS for all the other formatting. I know the complete separation of content and formatting is a noble ideal, but using CSS to emulate a table seemed like banging my head against a brick wall :-).

Best wishes,

Chris

Here are some advantages to "separation of content from formatting" and doing "100% of HTML generated by code".

1) If you sign up an advertiser, you can make sitewide changes easily 2) You can make layout, color scheme etc selectable by users 3) You can change layout of all pages simply by means of changing code

My site is not very neat because I am such a person. I wish I was neater. But it is changeable.

i

On Tue, 30 Oct 2007 03:14:00 +0000, with neither quill nor qualm, Christopher Tidy quickly quoth:

I haven't worked with it yet, but postgreSQL is another highly touted but free DBM. I've read that it scales even better than MySQL.

Google "postgresql vs. mysql" for more info. [standard disclaimer applies]

-- We have to fight them daily, like fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies. -- Etty Hillesum

(snip)

It depends on if you are looking for a site where you can concentrate on content, or if you want to spend the time re-writing something else that's already out there. I had this site up and running in one evening:

feeds into the site, content categorization, display layer, database calls, everything, all there. There's a bunch of apps out there already, if something meets 90% of your needs, you can always tweak it from there.

It depends. If you want to talk about this in email, my address is real.

Yup. I've got the OS-9 Level 2 materials sitting on the shelf right over (there). Yeah OK I need to clean up a bit but, I figure, if I save it long enough, it goes from old to antique. And I can't bear throwing it away, spent a lot of good time in that OS. Great training for Unix.

Trying to remember how that got addressed but yeah, there were some tricks to get quite a lot of memory. I was a young teen though so I couldn't afford more than 512K.

"but, where are the _games_?" (sheesh)

Solaris volume manager isn't evil once you get used to it. Certainly easier to use than Veritas Filesystem.

Depends on the point of the exercise, sure. When I get home I just want to use it, so the Mac meets my needs admirably.

Hard to argue that. I wouldn't mind having some modern-ish sun gear at home again, all my stuff is getting a bit aged. I'm also spoiled; at work we just migrated last weekend to a 4-node E25K cluster for one of our database apps. What a monster.

Yeah, maybe its time for a tech refresh.

Either way, they all speak the same language. But, I'm surprised there isn't a *nix-ish app which does taxes, other than for the Mac?

Umm... yes. At least, "non-Linux"!

Using undeclared variables in JavaScript does it just fine... I agree with the clue-by-four comment. And I just realized I wasn't specific enough -- it's a Dodge Dakota service manual.

They actually do some clever things with expanding tree views of the table of contents.