Neue Stelle

Ab sofort arbeite ich als IT-Entwickler für die Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften (ZBW). Im wesentlichen bin ich weiterhin für das e-journal zuständig. Und zum ersten Mal hab' ich eine unbefristete Stelle. Wow!

Gegen Bildungsarmut

Ich möchte doch kurz aufmerksam machen auf eine lokale, aber leider sehr sinnvolle und notwendige Initiative: Bildungsbrücke -- Initiative für Chancengleichheit im Viertel.

Die Initative hat sich im Bremer 'Viertel' gegründet und möchte mit Spendengeldern Kindern aus unterprivilegierten -- sprich: armen -- Haushalten schulische 'Nebenkosten' finanzieren. Das sollte allen, die es sich leisten können, eine Spende wert sein. Zur Nachahmung empfohlen (auch wenn es natürlich primär ein politisches Problem ist: dass Bildung in erster Linie von Einkommen und gesesellschaftlicher Stellung der Eltern abhängig ist, ist einer der schlimmsten Missstände in diesem Land).

ZFS and linprocfs

My FreeBSD workstation at home runs almost completely on ZFS, only /boot is UFS. This works really, really good. However, if you're running linux applications you need to mount linprocfs at startup. This causes the system to boot in single-user mode. It just can't mount /usr/compat, since this is on a ZFS filesystem which is mounted after the usual filesystems. In single-user mode you could then do

zfs mount -a
exit

and everything works again. Of course, that's no solution.

First idea: simply mount /usr as 'legacy' via fstab. Thats not very elegant. Second idea: change rcorder so that /etc/rc.d/zfs runs before /etc/rc.d/mountcritlocal. This might have some unconsidered sideeffects. It might also prevent ZFS from reading zpool.cache in /boot/zfs (I didn't try).

Then I discovered the 'late' option for mount(8) and fstab respectively. So the very simple solution is to change the linprocfs entry in /etc/fstab to:

linprocfs       /compat/linux/proc  linprocfs   rw,late  0   0

This prevents linprocfs from being mounted before ZFS-based /usr.

Opensolaris on it's Way

I'm really excited about ZFS, the revolutionary filesystem developed by some geniuses at Sun. Of course, it has already been implemented by FreeBSD and since 7.1-release I'm running my main working desktop with FreeBSD completely on ZFS (ok, nearly completely. There's still a small UFS partition needed for /boot). Besides some minor performance issues it works just great.

However, playing with ZFS has almost naturally directed my attention to Opensolaris. I've played around a bit with 2008.11 a few months ago and mostly liked it a lot. It has great features, mainly due to ZFS: you can create so called 'bootenvironments', that are automatically available via GRUB; Nautilus offers 'Time Slider', which is basically a visualization of ZFS snapshots; xorg and a nice looking GNOME-Desktop are working 'out-of-the-box' (something you can't say for FreeBSD) etc.etc.

But there were some huge drawbacks, mainly due to the missing software packages. I usually prefer XFCE as desktop environment, Opensolaris doesn't offer it. I tried to install it via compiling the source, but that was a pain and I could only make version 4.2 running. Bad. Even worse was the lack of gvim (my favourite editor) and most (my favourite pager) in the original sun-repositories. So, despite all the great features Opensolaris didn't qualify as a desktop replacement for FreeBSD (well, this will perhaps *never* happen) or even just Ubuntu (on my laptop).

Nevertheless I continued to watch the development and the community. Yesterday I could spent some time to give it another try inside a VirtualBox. 2009.04 is not released yet, but there is of course a development branch. So I switched the preferred software repository to http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev/ and updated the system by simply doing (as root):

pkg image-update -v

This created a new bootenvironment and makes the newest software packages available. And voila, now there are native packages for gvim (SUNWgvim) and most (SUNWmost). Still no xfce, but after configuring gnome a bit I think I could live with that. So, Opensolaris is really on a good way and I'm really looking forward to trying the next release. The next step for me will then be to try an installation on my laptop, because since kernel 2.6.24 Ubunutu refuses to work with my intel 3945G wifi chip. In the end hopefully Opensolaris can replace Ubuntu.

Nvidia driver doesn't work with 4G RAM

Playing with FreeBSD and X is a lot of fun these days. Besides all the problems with xorg 7.4 (don't update unless you know what you are doing!) I've now encountered a limitation of the nvidia binary driver. If you have 4G RAM X won't start at all and freezes the whole machine. That's due to the nvidia driver that can only handle 4G alltogether (phy machine AND graphic card). Someone suggested to set hw.phymem="3G" in /boot/loader.conf, but that didn't work for me. So either you must remove some RAM from the machine or you have to live with the xorg nv-driver which is VERY slow, at least with higher resolutions.