The Wahyudiharto's Blog

Thousands of blog writers has been reviewing about how succeeded they were after installing Fedora 13 on their various machine. Anyway, I will not write the same things in this article, sorry. As a runner distro – after Ubuntu at first as listed on distrowatch.com-, Goddard seems to be a more human friendly or might become a future Linux desktop. Don't worry, this is my judgment – as far as I'm concerned after I've proofed my self on my Aspire One AOA 150. It's signed by the whole parts of hardware which had been detected correctly by the kernel without using any tweak or hack. Well, this is not happened even when I using Fedora 10 a years ago.

I still loved Fedora - than Ubuntu – because it's a derivative from the ancestor - Red Hat. However, now my favorite desktop manager has moved to Gnome from KDE. In my opinion, Gnome offering a simple desktop, fast, light & weight than latest KDE. Again, this is relative judgment. But one thing for sure, most users like their desktop because of it's appearance. For example, many users moved to Windows Se7en because of it's skin (but it doesn't works for me since I still using XP for some works & games).

Mac4Lin on Fedora 13
I beat that workers who live with computer (like me, red) is always keep the desktop as useful & unique personalized as it can be. Talking about personalizing desktop – especially on Gnome – lots of themes available to apply. After a day busy on completing package I need – including enabling 3D compiz, now comes a time to personalize my desktop. There's no beautiful desktop as much as Mac OS X did – it remained my using it on my 12” Travelmate. Fortunately, a group of peoples out there has done their job to provide a transformation pack named Mac4Lin project. The goal is to make Linux desktop as closer look as OS X did.

Try to reach the package over this link & following the how to steps. In short, perhaps your desktop maybe similar to mine now.



The package complete with Mac theme, desktop background & icons. And it's absolutely suitable for Gnome, except the GDM which isn't changeable yet (even I had tried to tweak it with Ailurus or GDM2Setup for Ubuntu). Anyway, you can set it to auto-login mode so that it wouldn't display GDM login window anymore. Look at snapshot below, the left side of the screen displaying Nautilus (which is similar to Mac file browser) while the right side is Firefox (with extra add-ons & themes, will make much close to Safari browser appearance).



On the bottom of the screen, laid the Avant Window Navigator – A dock similar to Mac desktop. All available in a single package of Mac4Lin transformation pack. All you need to do is follow the instruction, a little yum download & bit of compiling tar balls. After it succeed, I guarantee for your satisfaction. Just try & believe me.

To change Plymouth animation (known as Red Hat Graphical Boot), try to take a look at gnome-look.org or kde-look.org & find one suitable for you. As I've tried, to changed this you need to compiled manually. Please take carefully to do that, once you follow the instruction then your Goddard may be safe.

BURG on Fedora 13
Last but not least is how to modify default GRUB into BURG. Well, a complete hand book I've found on their project website. Like others said that BURG is stand for GRUB, it's a unique name mirrored from GRUB ~ an update model of GRUB bootloader which used high graphic for boot background. I said, this is a revolutionary & pretty cute boot loader than used on Mac or Windows Se7en.

Note that I don't recommended it if you're newbies on Linux since it's totally hand made (manual) but If you dare to do this, than prepare for install all of the dependencies. First, connect to the internet & give below command on terminal:

#sudo yum install autoconf automake bison flex make gcc ruby python gettext-devel freetype-devel

also provide required extra software for the emulated version requires:

#sudo yum install ncurses-devel SDL-devel

To download the source, you need to install bazaar binary package.

#sudo yum install bzr

After it completed, create a folder named burg on your home folder and enter to that folder. While you're on it & for the first time need to downloading the source, from terminal, enter:

#bzr branch lp:burg

Then, let it sync a previously downloaded source tree to the latest version (This still should be run in your burg source directory):

#bzr pull

After each update, you need to regenerate the configuration files by running this command in the same burg source directory:

#./autogen.sh

After that, download themes pack from this link since the original source doesn't include it yet. Those above commands purposed for preparing BURG source code in burg directory on your home folder. Based on the original manual, you should specify BURG compile & install directory. In my experiment, I supply both with different directory, burg_nb for the compilation & burg_install for the target installation. Just follow it & create 2 new directory, then copy all of files from burg directory into burg_nb (except the zipped themes file, we will use it later).

Now enter to burg_nb directory via terminal and get start to compile with commands below:

#$HOME/burg/configure --with-platform=pc --prefix=$HOME/burg_install
#make
#make install

After compilation completed, extract zipped themes pack to folder burg_install. Continuing to create a default configuration file named by burg & save it to $HOME/burg_install/etc/default. Here below is my default burg configuration file:

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true
GRUB_GFXMODE=saved
GRUB_THEME=saved
GRUB_FOLD=saved

Just in case you need a backup, copy burg files to folder /etc/default. Now, tell BURG that you have others OS (eg: Windows) on your machine. To define this, open 40_custom file from $HOME/burg_install/etc/burg.d folder & specify where partition your Windows reside. See my 40_custom modified file below:

#!/bin/sh
exec tail -n +3 $0
# This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the
# menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change
# the 'exec tail' line above.
#

menuentry "Acer Recovery" --class windows --class os {
insmod ntfs
set root='(hd0,1)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 3ab0e580b0e542cd
chainloader +1
}

menuentry "Se7en" --class windows --class os {
insmod ntfs
set root='(hd0,2)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 3ab0e580b0e542cd
chainloader +1
}

As you can see on my example above (first partition contains Acer recovery partition & followed by Windows partition), please make an appropriate to your partition machine. Now, as root, install it to MBR so that it will take effect on the next boot:

#sudo $HOME/burg_install/sbin/burg-install /dev/sda
#sudo $HOME/burg_install/sbin/burg-mkconfig -o /boot/burg/burg.cfg

Then last, copy the extracted themes pack into /boot/burg. To check & re-check, make sure that you have already directory structure like mine below (or repeat from first step if it not the same):



Please note that users directory on picture above is your home directory. If there's no error reported after both commands above resulted, you may safely reboot your machine & get ready to see a changes.



See that, now GRUB has disappear replaced by BURG bootloader interface. To change themes, press “T” keyboard or “F3” to change the screen resolution or you can do some tweaks from configuration files modification (icons or backdround image) by reading the manual. Now, I have my favorite OS on my netbook, but I don't know how long it can stand. As the final words from this current article, I order to Fedora developer to enable GDM setup anymore (like previous GDM version) & add BURG as default bootloader on future release of Fedora. Please, share your own experience on Goddard on below comments box before leaving this blog. Thanks for passing by.

Labels: Acer Aspire One, Acer TravelMate, Fedora, Linux, Mac OSX86, Open Solaris, Ubuntu

It's been a long while I had Open Solaris 2008.11 on my Acer Aspire One ~ it's particularly 2nd generation model AOA150 got from Google with 8.9” screen & 120 GB hard drive. I think it's enough to play through with Open Solaris & need to try to get back to Fedora which I passed it for last 5 major version.

Now, I have Goddard – a codename of Fedora 13 – iso & a brand new Western Digital Passport (an external hard drive with 320 GB capacity) I bought from bhinneka.com. Since I don’t have an external optical drive, I always used USB mass storage to installing OS on my netbook. This time, I'd like to try my external 320 GB hard drive as the iso master installation rather than my 8 GB USB.

At first, I had unboxing the hard drive & let it parted with a free partition kit named by EASEUS Partition Master 6.1.1 Home Edition. After that, I'll have 4 partitions on it. See it on partition table illustration below:



On that table, I'm planning to store out my data into partition #2, #3 & #4 – so we can ignore it from now. Let focus on first red partition table (10 GB) which I prepared for Fedora 13 iso with FAT32 partition type. Like usual, I also use Fedora LiveUSB Creator to make USB flash disk boot-able. I thought that it would be succeed either on USB external hard drive but it wasn't!



On picture above, none of drive letters shows up on Target Device combo. Why was that happened? Explained on a FAQ WIKI pages, that Windows sometime detects certain drives as NOT being removable devices – perhaps a different device class between USB Mass Storage & USB Removable Drive. But with a clue on that, that kit can force the 1st mode. Don't run it from double click icon, just open up a DOS command prompt on active directory where that software placed & type:

liveusb-creator.exe --force X:

where X refer to your drive letter on your external hard drive. Look at the picture below, i used G: as the target partition. Hit enter on the prompt window & vice versa... the Fedora LiveUSB Creator now shows the G: drive letter.



As soon as this way succeed, i then continue to the rest of process which was #1) burning iso to the external drive (X:)



#2) copying also the iso to X: #3) and last, stand by for the first reboot to boot to the external drive from BIOS. Once it booted smoothly, you ain't have no trouble for more. Just follow the on screen wizard to complete your Fedora 13 a.k.a Goddard installation or you can found the manual documentation elsewhere over the internet. I'll be back for the next part of Goddard; the complete Mac OS X Gnome themes until change GRUB into BURG boot loader. Stay tune on this channel...

Labels: Acer Aspire One, Acer TravelMate, Fedora, Linux, Mac OSX86, Open Solaris, Ubuntu

How to calculate application performance? This is not a brand new question since there’s lots of benchmark software available on each purposes. For example, we can reckon a web based application performance from Firefox add-in named lori (Life of Request Info). This add-in do some basic statistic such as counting downloaded bytes & elapsed time from first click to load the application until it finished rendered to the browser – a simple tool than YSlow (of-course with different purpose), AFAIK. The best is, both of tools above support multi-platform in a Firefox browser. The image below is picture of lori & YSlow inside Firefox running over OpenSolaris 2008.11 on my netbook.



To counting how long process on a non-web based application will take time, perhaps you can try stopwatch application. For some OS, this kit is a build-in feature or at least it’s available on repositories. Below picture explain kind-of stopwatch application on Ubuntu 10.04 downloaded from default repository.



In a meantime you need to perform benchmark on an application but don’t have any internet connection to get those stopwatch (or you have forget to carry-up your watch or cell-phone), you can try to build your own stopwatch kit. The sample below, explain you how to make it from bash scripting shell & absolutely this is a universal kit for multi-platform on UNIX.

#!/bin/bash
BEGIN=$(date +%s)
while true; do
NOW=$(date +%s)
DIFF=$(($NOW - $BEGIN))
MINS=$(($DIFF / 60))
SECS=$(($DIFF % 60))
printf "\rTotal Waktu: %d:%02d" $MINS $SECS
done

Save the script above on text editor and make it executable. Run it from console & do whatever you want to do after doing that.



Have a great day!

Labels: Open Solaris, Programming, Ubuntu, Web Programming

Welcome back to 2nd articles about reviewing of OpenSolaris & this could be the last one I share you. The first part of it you may view here. If you have tried the live CD yet & certainly to continue to installation session then you must be sure about on where disk the OS will be placed. Since the manual documentation about it not touching very deeply, so I thought that this wouldn’t be a big problem – it is a common way to set Unix OS families – but then I was wrong. There’s some facts I found regarding to it:

Can’t Install on Logical Partition
This is rules that hasn’t documented very well yet. OpenSolaris setup will reject the installation if your dedicated space located on logical partitions; this is a contrary way on Mac OS or Linux. I found this when I have my last partition tables on my AspireOne. Take a look at below picture:



The green box refers to target partition which is currently installed with Fedora 7 & located on logical partition (7GB). With this situation - which I thought it wouldn’t rise a problem - I determined to install it no matter what. I then insert the CD, plugged-in external DVD drives, turn on the netbook, switch BIOS to boot the CD & let the live CD to run, just like the 1st article did.

After live CD completely loaded, you may found an install shortcut on desktop or jack’s desktop directory in file browser. Just double click on it.



The install wizard will start to run, but it only shows primary partition on Disk wizard! You see that my target partition is behind on EXT LBA partition type (91GB).



Based on this, I then go back to Windows to re-make the partition so that 7GB logical partition becomes a primary. Below picture show you what my partition table look like now (see that yellow part defined as BF type partition):



Once again, I run the live CD to start the installation wizard & voila… it has no problem anymore since I select that 7GB primary BF partition as target. Anyway, installation goes on smoothly without creating any problem. An article show you a complete installation of 2008.05 version (similarly to 2008.11) from A to Z, just click here to see.



This installation running on AspireOne will take approximately about 45-50 minutes, but I don’t have question about that. After giving it a bit of patient – finally - my first login was really a good experience... a decent wallpaper, slim design, attractive look and feel. Everything was pretty great. A GNOME default desktop.



A Bit Differ File System
Now, let’s take a look around on file browser (GNOME Nautilus). On picture below, you may see that the file system structure is a bit differs than any Unix OS families. There’s an additional system directories such as export, kernel, net, platform, rmdisk, rpool & system. Well, we’ll figured it out some later. By the way, my pendrive (USB mass storage device) was automatically detected in the system, check out an icon on the left panel (1.0 GB Media).



A weird thing happened since I doubt to describe why it shows so. While I expressly run Disk Usage Analyzer & found that 29.1GB are held on OpenSolaris system. What is this? I then check on df command on terminal & see that those 29.1GB seems come from total size of mounted file system (6.4GB readable from 7GB mounted as root).



However, my others existing FAT32 logical partition must readable from OpenSolaris (Local Disk D: & E:). A mount command – a common command on Unix – will solve this, I though but actually, it’s not that easy since disk device node is different from Unix. The node on OpenSolaris is what they called disk number. To see the disk number available on system, switch to root first & issue format command.

#format
Searching for disks...done

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
0. c4d0 ["DISK NUMBER"]
/pci@0,0/pci103c,30d9@1f,2/disk@0,0
Specify disk (enter its number): Ctrl+C

WARNING: Press Ctrl+C here and not enter. Otherwise you may format you Solaris partition. Anyway, from command above, a disk number named as c4d0 exist on my AspireOne – a pretty weird name huh? Before continuing, create d & e directory under /mnt. To mount my both FAT32 partition (D: & E:), issued a command:

#mount -F pcfs /dev/dsk/c4d0p0:d /mnt/d
#mount -F pcfs /dev/dsk/c4d0p0:e /mnt/e

Notice that the partition number should be entered exactly by typing pX after disk number, which X refer to partition number (p0 means partition 0). To mount NTFS file system, you need to download ntfs-3g package & issue a same command above. Read this manual for more details. Later, you can edit /etc/vfstab file for enabling automatic mounting drives at boot.

Enabling Network
On OpenSolaris, you can’t find ethX (similar to Unix) on your system. But I found a weird – again – name, it called rge0. To practice it, I then plugged in Ethernet cable with DHCP environment from my current office, thus I connected my system to internet. The picture below show you before & after the DHCP activation.



Package Manager provides another impressive feature which enables you to download & install software in your system by using graphical window. Here you can search a package by name, select it and click install/update. It will resolve all dependencies (Installation of a package requires another packages), download all of them and install in your system. "opensolaris.org" is the default repository, you can add your own repository and create new package of your own.



While download process by Package Manager is running, I then try to run FireFox to surf my blog. Surprisely that OpenSolaris 2008.11 was fully equipped with FireFox version 3. The surfing access now more similar to others.



Also, I checked out messaging program which is Pidgin as default application. I then login to my account on yahoo & in short, it running & connected successfully.



Changes on GRUB
I was trying to edit the "menu.lst" from "/boot/grub/menu.lst" but found that "For zfs root, menu.lst has moved to /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst". I need to edit it because I have to enabling boot menu for the AspireOne recovery disk accessible. And finally, here below is complete of menu.lst file:

splashimage /boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
background 215ECA
timeout 5
default 1
#---------- ADDED BY BOOTADM - DO NOT EDIT ----------
title OpenSolaris 2008.11 snv_101b_rc2 X86
findroot (pool_rpool,3,a)
splashimage /boot/solaris.xpm
foreground d25f00
background 115d93
bootfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS,console=graphics
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive
#---------------------END BOOTADM--------------------

title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

title AspireOne Recovery Disk
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

# Unknown partition of type 15 found on /dev/rdsk/c4d0p0 partition: 3
# It maps to the GRUB device: (hd0,2) .

# title OpenSolaris 2008.11 snv_101b_rc2 X86 text boot
# findroot (pool_rpool,3,a)
# bootfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris
# kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS
# module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive

After made a reboot, here below picture of my boot GRUB splash:



Anything Else?
Actually, there’s more things to explore but I didn’t have much time to did it & share you to this blog. By now, it’s about hundreds of current title spread over the internet or you can find useful tips & trick by joining forum on opensolaris.org.May this article brief you a bit benefits.

Labels: Acer Aspire One, My Share, Open Solaris

Somehow, in early 2009, I’ve been interested exactly on rumors spread over the internet about latest version of OpenSolaris & finally I made an experiment on my AspireOne. Better late then never, this is my first experience to face with this free Sun OS product based on Unix family in x86 machine (UMPC), even not a truly SPARC one. But at least, I was too curious to try or need to figured it out & compared to others Unix based OS such as Linux or Mac OS.

OpenSolaris 2008.11 available for free download from solaris.org. It comes with single ISO’s CD (687MB). However, I was succeeded grabbed it for almost 2 days from my office computer. Actually, my first plan is try to create a portable LiveUSB, but obviously this method also offered from Belenix, another OpenSolaris distribution community. One else important things is, I was too sick to get different fresh USB ISO one. So, here I go, steady still with LiveCD instead.

At first, I wonder if I can make a way to boot the ISO from AspireOne without external CD/DVD drive. But unfortunately, none of my thought was did. The plan to bundled the ISO to USB flash has failed. Another plan to boot from an existing Fedora 7 partition with GRUB also didn’t worked. Last plan to load native ISO from GRUB was too far. So, I end up doing more crazy things with an external DVDRW plugged on it after burning the ISO on a blank CD. Pretty dumb to wasting too much times ha ha...



Anyway, in minutes, I’m ready to boot from LiveCD. This LiveCD completes with GRUB loader & nothing fails from hardware detection initializing. At the end of loading process which I thought it was completed to show a desktop, but it only show a text mode console login. So, where the hell is my desktop? It must be a trouble with VGA card, a common equal problem as Linux happened when startx failed to executed. From this point, I then login as user (user: jack & password: jack, default LiveCD user) & started to verify the log. I found that the trouble raised when LiveCD tried to load intel driver. If you meet the same problem as I did, then login as root to generate a representative xorg.conf to change the driver to vesa from intel.

$su
Password: (default password for root is opensolaris)
# /usr/X11/bin/Xorg –configure

This procedure should create /jack/xorg.conf.new. Edit this file using vi text editor, search for Device Section & modify the Driver line to:

Driver “vesa”

Still stay in root mode & try to lunch GNOME desktop manager (I couldn’t find any desktop manager except this on OpenSolaris LiveCD):

# /usr/X11/bin/xinit /usr/bin/dbus-launch gnome-session -- \/usr/X11/bin/Xorg –config /jack/xorg.conf.new :0

And… voila, here we’ll see the GNOME desktop. Until this, everything is much similar to Linux than Mac OS. LiveCD image looks fine, really decent and pretty impressive.



Check out a "Device driver Utility" icon on the desktop. If you think any of your hardware device is not working, check out from here that whether driver support for that device is available or not. For example below, my wireless on Acer AspireOne recognized but it need 3rd party driver to work properly. Though, I couldn’t resolve how to activate built-in webcam & both of MMC readers has failed when I tried to insert 1GB of SD Card.



Anyway, this is still “a work progress” since I have not yet finished the configuration of all devices. Come back soon for more detailed version.

Available General Hardware


In a while, enjoy that root’s GNOME desktop for a bit. I’ll continue my next post for the installation process in a short.

Labels: Acer Aspire One, My Share, Open Solaris