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

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

OpenSXCE

Mystery solved

The new open sourced solaris / illumos distribution is called OpenSXCE (as in Open Solaris Express Community Edition - a clin d'oeil to the original open sourcing done by Sun and the Express program)

OpenSXCE

brought to you by Martin Bochnig 30 January 2013
Here is the first release of OpenSXCE for SPARC.
OpenSXCE 2013.01 Live for SPARC (1.2GB) -- 30 January 2013

The site is www.opensxce.org

Note the md5sum : 330a82654405c77c8cea903ed18117f2


@f_dion

Git error setting certificate verify location

Problem

Under OpenIndiana, you might have  tried a git clone https://github.com/something....

and got this:

Cloning into something...
error: error setting certificate verify locations:
  CAfile: /etc/curl/curlCA
  CApath: none
 while accessing https://github.com/something....

fatal: HTTP request failed

Solution

The  fix is easy:

su
Password:

mkdir -p /etc/curl && cat /etc/certs/CA/*.pem > /etc/curl/curlCA

Bonjour / avahi / zeroconf

I use a few Raspberry Pi on my network. I gave them proper hostnames. I could map the DNS and all that, but I simply have avahi running on them, so I can access them with hostname.local.

Multicast

For OpenIndiana to support zeronconf, all that is needed is this:

fdion@p490s:~$ su
Password:
fdion@p490s:~# vi /etc/nsswitch.conf

[here, I just added mdns:

hosts:      files mdns dns
ipnodes:    files mdns dns

]
fdion@p490s:~# svcadm enable svc:/network/dns/multicast:default
fdion@p490s:~# exit

From that point on, I can simply use:

fdion@p490s:~$ ssh -X rpi01.local

And of course, I had to configure Avahi on the Raspberry Pi.

This also works with my Macs, I can use ssh mac01.local for example.

The Sidekick

Wrapping up the week, I just wanted to mention The Sidekick. No, not that phone thing. This one (raspberry-python blog). And the follow up article.

The sidekick is my desktop's sidekick. A secondary computer that complements my workstation. Not in term of speed or anything like that. But in term of adding a whole world of possibilities to interface with all kinds of stuff. Like a vinyl cutter, or a barometer.

Pi. Raspberry Pi

Quite the sidekick this little computer. If you've never heard of it, head out to Raspberrypi.org and read up on it, check the FAQ. Then come back to the Raspberry Pi Python Adventures to learn more.


[edit] forgot to publish this, so here you go.

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):