OpenIndiana workstation, OI_151 a year later

Well, coincidentally, I just noticed that I've had OpenIndiana (OI 151) on my main workstation for a whole year exactly today (September 14th 2011, and today is September 14th 2012).

I also find that although it can multiboot (from the OI grub) Windows 7 and Linux Mint beside OI, I've not really spent any time in these other OSes. Just no need. I'll spend some time on the Mac workstation (my 8th Mac since the 80s), but mostly for XCode.

Outside of XCode though, I get back to OI almost immediately. The Mac, like my VMWare server (with various OSes) is used mostly as part of my build system, driven by Jenkins CI. And I got lazy to walk to the Mac, so I actually access it with VNC:

The VNC window is 1600x1200, that gives an idea of how spacious a 2560 x 1440 desktop really is. The monitor on the OpenIndiana workstation is a Catleap Q270 which uses the same LG IPS panel as the Apple 27", but without the awful super glossy. It still has a bit of reflection, but it is low gloss (I dont know of any matte version of that panel). It replaced two 20" 1600x1200 in a xinerama 3200x1200 desktop. I needed more vertical space, I can see more code at once like that.

In case anybody needs it, the Q270 doesn't provide the correct edid info, so you have to hardwire one in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Screen"
    Option "CustomEDID" "DFP-0: /etc/X11/edid-q270.bin"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
#    Option "UseEdid" "False"
#    Option "ExactModeTimingsDVI" "True"
    Option         "TwinView" "0"
    Option         "metamodes" "nvidia-auto-select +0+0"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
        Modes       "2560x1440"
    EndSubSection
EndSection

and the edid as a hex dump:

00 FF FF FF  FF FF FF 00  04 62 9B 04  00 00 00 00
28 15 01 03  A5 3C 22 78  22 6F B1 A7  55 4C 9E 25
0C 50 54 00  00 00 01 01  01 01 01 01  01 01 01 01
01 01 01 01  01 01 56 5E  00 A0 A0 A0  29 50 30 20
35 00 55 50  21 00 00 1A  00 00 00 FC  00 51 48 44
32 37 30 0A  20 20 20 20  20 20 00 00  00 FC 00 0A
20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20  00 00 00 FC
00 0A 20 20  20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20  20 20 00 7E
0A 

You'll have to convert the hexdump back to bin and put it in /etc/X11/edid-q270.bin (or whatever you put in the xorg.conf). Bug me in the comments if you need the actual bin file, I'll post it somewhere.

I'll leave you with one of my favorite wallpapers (I have a bunch of wallpapers on autorotation, and different for each workspace):