failing beadm

All of a sudden I was unable to create a new environment.

hajma@briza:~$ pfexec beadm create test
Unable to create test.
Doesn't exist.

Huh. After a bit of googling a learned about the BE_PRINT_ERR variable and that helped me to find the culprit:

hajma@briza:~$ BE_PRINT_ERR=true pfexec beadm create test
get_mountpoint_from_vfstab: failed to open vfstab (/export/testzone/root/etc/vfstab)
_update_vfstab: failed to open vfstab (/tmp/.be.TTayGg/etc/vfstab): No such file or directory
be_copy_zones: failed to update new BE's vfstab (zbe-1)
be_copy: failed to process zones
be_copy: destroying partially created boot environment
Unable to create test.
Doesn't exist.

It looks like the testzone was to blame. Since I did not have anything of a value in that zone, I just deleted it and everything started working again.

delta

I just discovered delta, a tool to minimize interesting files. It took a 500kB file of preprocessed code that was causing a crash in the C++ compiler and reduced it to 1.1kB or 22 lines of code with the same effect. Wonderful! How could I have lived without it so far?

AM200g again

A year and half ago I said I'd come back to the AM200g firmware when I have the time. While WRT the time it's not really the case, I managed to install RedHat 9 (yup, that's the requirement!) to VirtualBox and run the ./consumer_install script that Asus' engineers provided.
To my surprise the firmware built absolutely smoothly, without a single glitch.

I'm going to test the firmware now so if you don't see me online you know what happened :-)

I don't have any plans for tuning the firmware, but if the router is still alive when the provider starts offering IPv6, it may come handy.

Calligra on Solaris

Calligra, the fork of KOffice, is now buildable on Solaris. Some parts are missing, however - Krita and Tables are not present because they require the Eigen linear algebra library. Eigen is basically a bunch of C++ templates and if there's one field where Sun/Oracle Studio is losing breath, it's templates. Due to a bug in Studio, anything that touches Eigen is unbuildable :-(

Also there are some nasty crashes, like in Plan and some modules fail to load due to broken linkage so you only get limited feature in Kformula, Flow and others, but this can well improve as soon as we run some ldd checks on the binaries.

Here're some screenshots:

 Plan WorkPackage

 Flow

 Karbon

 Kexi

 KThesaurus

Words

Braindump