Concepts in the Paradox

I went home early with the dizzies and a scratchy throat. After the drugs kick in, I think I’ll resume installing OpenBSD on the Zaurus. I was able to get the bsd.rd to start up, and the little guy is dual booting, but after I fdisk’d the thing (very carefully, mind you), I discovered that the USB network card wasn’t being picked up by OpenBSD. This totally sucks, because I wanted to do the net install.

After double-checking the supported device listing, I found that my SMC 2102USB is indeed supported by the kue driver. My theory is that the card is sucking down more power than the Zaurus’s little usb port can pump out, so I’m going to run it through a powered hub to see if that fixes it. If not, then I’m doing a disk install, since I left 400MB for the Sharp ROM so the dual boot would still work. I’ll pull over the tarballs from the openbsd site, load them onto the 400MB partition which is fat32 formatted, and do a disk install.

4 more days until I get the CF wireless card. Right now it is on a truck in Texas. Damn Texans! Give me my network card!

It’s been two weeks since I bought the iMac with the Intel Duo processor, so I thought I’d share my opinions on how everything is working as a day to day workstation.

The setup: 20″ iMac Core Duo, 512MB Ram, OSX 10.4.5, attached VP201b LCD to DVI-out, standard Apple Keyboard, Mighty Mouse

First of all, Rosetta, Apple’s G3 processor emulator, works quite well. So far I’ve used Office, VLC, Xjournal, and MenuMeters in their old G3 binary formats and they work well. I had to ditch NeoOffice, since the installer would refuse to run, and DarwinPorts and Fink both haven’t ported to the Intel CPU yet. I had to upgrade MissingSync to the Universal binary format for it to work right, but alas that is only a beta.

On the average, I have iTunes, Safari, X11, ThunderBird, and Xjournal all running at the same time. With only 512MB of memory, the machine tends to come to a crawl when switching applications. Checking out the VM usage shows that 500MB of swap is in use, and after about a week of normal use, the swap climbs to 1.5GB. The CPU is almost always idle, so the main culprit here is memory use.

On the stability front, Rosetta apps tend to be a little on the slow side and crash at startup randomly. VLC and Xjournal tend to crash at startup, but once they are up and going they are stable. Office seems a little slow at times, but Office has always seemed slow to me. I can’t wait for NeoOffice, even being java based, to make it’s return to the Mac with it’s new platform, since it feels snappier than Office.

A new feature of the iMac is the ability to attach an external monitor and do an “extended” desktop, as opposed to the mirrored display you could do on the iMac G5. This has proved to be very useful, since now I can drag apps from the iMac screen to one of my Viewsonic VP201b LCD displays. Now I only wish expose would be more sensible about multi-display systems: having to scurry my cursor around two screens to get to an app can quickly become tedious.

I just ordered two 1GB sticks of Kingston memory, which were $274.09 after tax and shipping. Hopefully this will take care of what is basically my only complaint with this setup, a lack of available RAM! Now if only the iMacs could take more than 2GB of RAM…

This weekend is CodeCon, which features various programming projects and ideas from the employed and unemployed programmers in the Bay Area. Take a look at the program to see if there is anything interesting you’d like to see. I’ve found that CodeCon projects often bear fruit, or give a good indication of where software in the industry is heading.

For example, long before Flickr was hot for photo uploading, there were projects at Codecon showing how to hack Flickr long before Yahoo! stepped in as owner. SCM projects, P2P, and audio hackery are also projects one would expect to find there.

So grab $85, plus some money for food and booze, and everyone for a 3 day coding geekout — and of course all the enjoyment that San Francisco has to offer.

Also, there will be llama-tipping.

I’ve started my work toward learning more about the open source virtualization software known as Xen. My target is Xen 3.0, or Xen-unstable as it is called, which I will evetually deploy as a production system at work.

Here is where I am at so far:

OpenSuSE 10 RC1’s packages don’t work properly. This is unfortunate, because I work at a Novell shop. The problem I am having are:

1. While the Xen kernel is installed at booting, new domains hang

2. Stopping a hung DomU hangs xend
3. Only rebooting clears hung DomU’s from memory

This is a problem dealing with both the OpenSuSE yast2 created images and from pulling a SLES9 image from the imaging server. I’m going to try QEMU packages from FreeOsZoo next.

Giving up on OpenSuSE for now, I pulled down Fedora Core 4 with updated Xen packages. The main bug here is that Xend doesn’t work out of the box; you’ll have to make some magical directories in /var for it to start up, otherwise it’ll go on and on about a missing file or directory.

mkdir /var/run/xenstore /var/lib/xenstore

I’m glad I archive the xen-users mailing list. Grep is my friend. The Wiki is useful too.

The next step is to try to bring up a DomU once I pull down my SLES9 image again. If it works in FC4, then I’ll play in FC4 until the next milestone in OpenSuSE is out and about or try and fail again to pull xen-unstable from cvs.