Setting Goals

If you’ve not any goals, then what are you striving for? How will you know when you get there? What will you have accomplished?

With goals, we can focus on getting the results we want. A goal must be several things:

• Specific – is your goal specific and clear enough?
• Measurable – can you measure concretely when the goal is achieved?
• Achievable – is the goal achievable? (or is it just a dream?)
• Realistic – is the goal a realistic goal?
• Timely – is there a time limit on the goal?

The SMART acronym helps you to remember this. The acronym itself is not important; the important thing is the goals you set.

I urge you to sit down and write out some goals and then the specific next actions (using GTD of course!) that you will do to achieve those goals. What steps will you take to accomplish these goals?

Why FreeBSD is (and isn’t) My Favorite Operating System

Over at Webmasters by Design there was a very interesting article by Scott Spear about Why FreeBSD is My Favorite *nix OS. Like him, I find FreeBSD to be wonderful and like it a lot. However, I find that I don’t want to use it for everything.

Why I Like BSD: Small Footprint

FreeBSD works in many, many, many more places than Linux – and even more places than Solaris. There just isn’t a lot of overloaded kernel involved. As kernels grow faster and faster, it is refreshing to be able to use something not so bloated.

Why I Like BSD: History

Unlike Linux, BSD goes back a very long ways (longer than Solaris even) and is UNIX. It is possible that with the exception of Unixware and NetBSD, no other UNIX system has as much of a history. Some of the original developers are still involved in FreeBSD (Marshall McKusick comes to mind).

Why I Like BSD: Cohesiveness

No matter how hard they try, a Linux distribution can’t match the overall cohesiveness of one of the BSD systems (such as FreeBSD). Some Linux distributions are very well done, but they still have “missing parts” – usually documentation.

Why I Like BSD: Documentation

There is nothing that matches FreeBSD documentation in the Linux world. Once, I ran a test: I wrote a script to test for the existance of man pages for every binary in the usual locations on the system (/bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin). Red Hat Linux come up with a number of programs that were undocumented; FreeBSD did not have a single missing man page.

All of the kernel tunables can also be found in man pages, and more.

The FreeBSD Handbook is phenomenal, and a valuable resource. Linux environments don’t have anything like it.

Why I Don’t Like BSD: Linux (In)Compatibility

Linux compatibility fails as often as it succeeds, and it is more of a simulated environment than it is just a compatibility layer. It doesn’t work, it’s bloated and it’s wrong to rely on it in any case.

Why I Don’t Like BSD: Flash et al

Getting to use Flash in FreeBSD is a nightmare. Even following the directions is no guarantee that it will work. Distributions such as OpenSUSE and Ubuntu come ready to plug in Flash support, and Adobe has specified that they will support Linux. That leaves out FreeBSD.

This may be better in PCBSD; I aim to try it soon.

Why I Don’t Like BSD: Installation

Sysinstall is not the easy install process that installation of distributions like Ubuntu and OpenSUSE is. There are way too many technical details to comprehend.

This probably has improved with FreeBSD 7; I’ve not yet tried FreeBSD 7.

UNIX text pagers: more (or less)?

During your work on a system, you’ll often want to page through a document or some output. Aside from the pagers more and less and view, there really are no other ubiquitous options. There are other programs like w3m and pg, but they are not commonly found.

view has a lack of support for input from stdin (such as from a pipe or another command). This rules it out for lots of administration work. It is, however, ubiquitous, as it is part of vi. If you are used to vi, you may want to use view for looking at files (though not for output).

less is, as are many tools, found everywhere as one of the first things added – but almost never installed by default. The reason for this is unclear – other programs such as perl and ruby and tcl are also often found this way (that is, not installed by default but nearly always installed after the fact). If it is added that often, it should be part of the default install, one would think.

However, more is everywhere and is installed by default. The version of more installed on HP-UX appears to be much enhanced over the original more – a fact that is made apparent when you’ve gotten used to HP-UX more and try to use the Linux more. HP-UX more allows you to go back, to search, and other things that are not present in the Linux more.

Perhaps someone should copy the HP-UX more into Linux…. Hmmm…..

(Not) Installing OpenSolaris 200805 onto a Compaq nc4010

Solaris is by all accounts a great operating system (I continue to think so) but OpenSolaris 200805 on this laptop does not show any of the excellence that Solaris is supposed to have.

I have tried Solaris x86 in the past, including installing Solaris 2.6 onto an aging 486, and installing Solaris 8 onto several different machines, including laptops. None of these installs have had as many problems as installing OpenSolaris 200805 onto this machine. Installing OpenSolaris 200805 into a VirtualBox virtual machine was slick; not so this system. (I still don’t know why a complete install description is required for virtual environments; it’s just another computer system after all.)

First, I installed OpenSolaris to a physical hard drive using the VirtualBox machine to do so. This worked beautifully. Installed, no problem.

However, booting the installed operating system provided a big problem: apparently the root filesystem definition is buried in the filesystem itself (ZFS) so that booting the disk from anywhere else in the system causes the boot to fail. This is not the problem – the problem is trying to find out how to fix it. With Linux, a kernel parameter and a fix to /etc/fstab is all that is needed.

In searching for the answer to this, there were a number of stumbling blocks – obvious ones – and there seemed to be no one who had answered this problem properly:

• Boot into Failsafe mode and… When I see that, I always wonder what operating system they’re using: OpenSolaris 200805 has no failsafe mode. (Later on, I found out that OpenSolaris 200805 was the first Solaris to not have a failsafe mode…. nice.) This is not helpful, and rules out a majority of the responses right off the bat.
• OpenSolaris 200805 uses ZFS as the root filesystem. This means that a) it is new and not well-tested; and b) most answers to this problem are irrelevant as they are assuming UFS as the root filesystem, not ZFS.

Having had such problems just getting the stupid drive to boot, I gave up: I tried to install directly, using a 3.5″ USB disk caddy with a CD/DVD ROM player in it. The system will boot from this, but the speed was very slow.

The first try resulted in the machine freezing at about 22% done. After rebooting, the system would continually hang right after the initial SunOS boot text. I was able to fix this (after many reboots and freezes) by booting into Linux and overwriting the half-baked install on the internal disk. Thus, the pre-existing data on the internal disk (unused) was enough to cause OpenSolaris to freeze up (I’d used the “entire disk” install option – which presumably wipes the DOS-style partition table clean off the drive).

The second try resulted in a complete install, but that was it. No reboot ever succeeded there after. The system froze first at the “zfs0 is …” text, then at “tz0 is …”, then another one. Trying the option “-B acpi-user-options=0×8″ permitted the machine to boot long enough to shut itself off!

About then is when I decided I’d had enough. Maybe Solaris Express or Belenix will work, but OpenSolaris is extremely poor in this department – which is so disappointing. Did I mention that OpenSolaris does not support JumpStart installs either?

With this sort of track record, I cannot recommend OpenSolaris for laptops – nor for production x86 servers. Sad really – I’d been looking forward to getting OpenSolaris on one of my laptops – very much, as a matter of fact.

Overview: how to install UNIX/Linux to a machine with no bootable disk

Installing operating systems to the HP nc4010 ultralight notebook has been an excercise in how to accomplish the seemingly impossible: installing an operating system to a laptop with no removable disk and no bootable disk.

Generally, there are three different ways to do this:

• Boot from the network using PXE.
• Boot from an external add-on device such as USB CDROM or USB memory device.
• Create a bootable disk in another system and install the disk afterwards.

Booting from the network requires several servers to be set up, including a TFTP server, a NFS server, and a DHCP server. Though they could all be on the same machine, it does represent a significant amount of set up and configuration in order to install, including the need to copy all installation parts to the NFS server to be served up to clients. In addition, there are special configurations needed for DHCP to get this started.

Booting from an external device is much easier, and can be done on the nc4010 and probably can be done on most laptops from the last 10 years or so. This method is probably the easiest to accomplish and without any fuss.

Alternately, it is possible to install the operating system normally in another system and then transfer the disk over to the new system. The biggest problem – the major problem – is that the disk locations all change. What had been /dev/hd1 is now /dev/hd0; all of this will need to be changed in order to have the new system boot properly.

The boot loader may also need to be changed to recognize the new location of the disk.

Linux has a parameter “root=/dev/zzzz” which allows the boot process to specify where the system root disk is. After this, then /etc/fstab will have to be changed (which is standard everywhere).

Solaris has UFS and ZFS, and UFS can be modified to reflect a new source disk location. ZFS is more troublesome and hard to do, as the filesystem is newer and has not been used as a boot drive for hardly any time at all. I still do not have an understanding of how to convert ZFS from using one boot disk to another (in name only) – once that happens, I’ll have OpenSolaris on an nc4010.