Pycharm 3.02 on OpenIndiana

The IDE

Working on the Ajax module of Brython (and multilingual documentation)

Requirements

PyCharm, the free community edition and the professional versions simply require a Java JDK. I use the Oracle (Sun) JDK7 on OpenIndiana.

Installation

The only challenge is downloading the tar.gz file. By faking the user agent to firefox for linux, the download link appears:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0

Then it's a matter of gunzip and tar -xvf and moving the directory to /opt and running pycharm.sh in the bin folder.

Francois
@f_dion

Repair, Upgrade or Replace

[I had decided to not publish this, but with the LX brand revived, I thought it would be an interesting story post]

The perpetual question

Repair, upgrade or replace? It doesn't matter if we are talking about an appliance, a car, furniture or a laptop. Whatever it is, it will break or become obsolete. It's all a question of scale and time, and outside pressures.

What do I mean by outside pressures? Let's say you have a car, it is yours and it is working fine. You drive it 30,000 miles each year. It does 20mpg (US). Let's say gas price is $3.50 a US gallon, that's a tad over $5000 a year to make it run (not counting normal maintenance). A lot of money to go from point A to point B, but still within reason. The outside pressure is minor. But let's bump up gas price to $9.00 a gallon, and we are now talking over $13,000 a year. $27,000 over two years. ROI on getting a new car with twice the mpg is now pretty obvious.

But what if there are no options

In our example above we assume there is such a thing as a 40mpg vehicule that can replace the one you have. But what if I told you it has to be able to tow 6000lbs? There might not be any option that fit the bill. So you have to compromise in one way or another. And that is where it gets complicated.

Lightweight, but not lightweight

If you spend times going from one place to another doing presentations, no doubt you've welcomed tablets and ultra portable laptops. To be able to demo a specific n-tier setup or even a whole datacenter directly on a 13" laptop that weighs less than 3.5 lbs is definitely a great thing.

I've been using for a few years a Sony Vaio Z that is totally custom. Large SSD, large drive, multi core. Ram was the limitation back then, 8GB. But anybody familiar with Solaris or (open source solaris) IllumOS based OSes knows that thanks to cpu and memory sharing between each zones and the full virtual networking capability of crossbow, you can simulate a lot of machines within that 8GB.

My outside pressure

Linux zones are no longer available, so I have to rely on virtualbox or other similar solutions. They dont share ressources such as memory and are not lightweight solutions like zones. 8GB is no longer acceptable. CPU or disk is not a problem (not dealing with big data, just terabyte scale).

Lack of solutions

For some reason there are very few lightweight laptops with > 8GB. 16GB seems to be the next barrier, but typically with a very low screen resolution. Why is that? I don't know. So, for right now I have to choice but to wait on technology to catch up, assuming market demand. [Or, now, hope to get LX branded zones back. If somebody was looking for a good business case, I'm giving you one]



François
@f_dion

LX zones back in illumos and OpenIndiana?

Branded Zones

If you've used Solaris and typed man lx, you saw:

Standards, Environments, and Macros lx(5)NAME

lx - Linux branded zone

DESCRIPTION


The lx brand uses the branded zones framework described in
brands(5) to enable Linux binary applications to run unmodi-
fied on a machine with a Solaris Operating System kernel.

The lx brand includes the tools necessary to install a Cen-
tOS 3.x or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.x distribution inside
a non-global zone. The brand supports the execution of 32-
bit Linux applications on x86/x64 machines running the
Solaris system in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode.

Supported Linux Distributions
The lx brand emulates the system call interfaces provided by
the Linux 2.4.21 kernel, as modified by Red Hat in the RHEL
3.x distributions. This kernel provides the system call
interfaces consumed by the glibc version 2.3.2 released by
Red Hat.

In addition, the lx brand partially emulates the Linux /dev
and /proc interfaces.


But if you've followed the story, lx branded zones became a mere historical reference. Until now.

Reintroduction

David Mackay posted the following webrev to the illumos developer mailing list:

http://cr.illumos.org/~webrev/DavidJX8P/lx-zones-restoration/


This is great, and I hope this gets reintegrated and pushed in the next openindiana!

François
@f_dion

The wrong OS

I always cringe when I see a crashed display in an airport, a store etc. That's what happens when you run a PC and Windows for a digital signage solution:

You can see the windows 7 start bar at the left side...

Bluetooth btms_installer.sh

Blast from the past

Not an article today, just a question:

Does anybody know where I can find a copy of btms_installer.sh?

It used to be at:

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/bluetooth/btms_installer.sh

François
@f_dion

OI: Python modules that need cc

Tempting

So, it is always tempting to be at the latest greatest of some software. For example, Sun (Solaris) Studio 12 update 3 is freely available to download. But sometimes the latest will leave you with some head scratching.

Python modules

Some Python modules require a C compiler in order to provide a faster runtime, or even to install at all. Numpy is one such module. It provides superb capabilities in Python, but even doing:

# pip install numpy

It will still invoke the C compiler. Due to how the Python interpreter was compiled on OpenIndiana, by using the latest compiler (installed, say, in /opt/solarisstudio12.3), your install will fail. Using the Sun Studio in the opensolaris.org repository (yes, the old 12.1), things work great, as it is installed in /opt/sunstudio12.1

So if you encounter a failed install of a Python module under OpenIndiana, there is a good chance you hit the above problem.

François
@f_dion

dtrace with Python

dtrace: Python instrumentation

...where time becomes a loop

Last year, I mentionned that it was time for the Python community to embrace dtrace. I've gotten questions left and right, at user groups, through email etc as to what is dtrace and how it ties in with Python.

This week, a few posts on the Argentinian and Venezuelan Python lists on debugging Python and a total absence of a mention of dtrace and I knew I had to do a writeup. But before we get into the details, let's step back a bit.

Head over to my Python blog to read the rest of the article.

François
@f_dion