ACK!!'s Journal: Riding the Blastwave

So my little windows work laptop was about to get an upgrade from 2000 to XP.

That was cool but it meant me being dead in the water with no computer for a couple of hours at least.

So I sat there staring at my sad little Ultra 5 on my desktop. It should be happy I had upgrading its hard drive a while back to a fat 60GB model and it had 256MB of memory which was pretty decent. But it was not a happy computer because except as a script development and internal web server for our group it did so very little.

I mean it was not taxed, tested or pushed. So, I had been hearing about this place. It was like this place that had a ton of cool desktop packages for Solaris. They called it blastwave.org.

I was about to make my sad little Sun box very happy.

I downloaded their version of pkg-get. I did the pkgadd and started calculating all the little things to download and install next.

I got it from here:

http://www.blastwave.org/pkg-get.php/

But the first thing I ran was simple:

pkg-get -i gnome firefox mozilla gnumeric

Ok, that got me a desktop and a browser and a spreadsheet program. w00t!

It was just that simple swear to god. Sure, I had issues and I will get to those in a second. But I had a real 2.8 Gnome desktop. I had my firefox browser. Not only that I had a spreasheet program worthy enough to open most anything that nasty old Excel could push at it.

No Abiword. And Gnome has no Presentation software.

Off to go get OpenOffice from here:

http://download.openoffice.org/1.1.4/index.html/

Installing it is as simple as remembering how to o the net install. It goes into opt.

Ok, what is next?

Browser plugins were fairly easy with one major exception.

Java is pretty damn obvious.

http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp/

Adobe Acrobat was easy too:

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html/

Flash is available for Sparc as well:

http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&P2_Platform=Solaris&P3_Browser_Version=Netscape4/

RealPlay 10 from the HelixPlayer folks is not as obvious:

https://helixcommunity.org/download.php/571/realplay-10.0.0.297-sunos-5.8-sparc.bin/

So, lets see I got gaim with my gnome desktop for IM chatting love.

I got firefox for browsing.

OpenOffice + gnumeric hits most of those basic I got to be able to read my fellow co-worker's documents stuff.

I got gftp for ftp or now sftp work.

Nautilus allowed me to connect to the corporate shares.

In fact, that is where I got the proprietary Remedy client. Remedy is the software used for tracking tickets. This is something that not even linux can handle.

Ok, but what about tunes or movies and other stuff?

Here comes my issues with the blastwave packages. Totem never really launches if I run the command from the terminal it just hangs. rhythmbox segfaults immediately and was missing gconf stuff to. But .....

xmms worked for playing music files of almost every time and gxine worked for opening a ton of video formats. Wait a sec what about movies in a browser? gxine starts to launch the url with its plugin and then hangs. Oh well cannot have it all now can we?

Oh yeah, the CUPs package worked perfect to help me connect to my network printer.

I did a
pkg-get -i ximian-connector
And suddenly I could connect to the Exchange server at work with one tweak.

I could not connect for days I just shrugged my shoulders and figured it was something on the corporate side until I noticed that Plaintext passwords could NOT be selected. I stopped gconf --shutdown and evolution --force-shutdown and then edited the .gconf-csw/evolution/mail xml file and right after my username I put auth=Basic so it looked like username;auth=[e-mail].

Then I really could see my corporate email from my Solaris box.

I was actually surprised at how snappy the thing felt. It made me realize that a fast disk and lots of ram are more important than cpu. The menu re-draw rate was better than my sad little linux laptop with 128MB of ram.

It had its issues and short comings.

Still, this is pretty good list of features for a really old Sun Ultra 5 running Solaris 8 for goodness sakes.

Why even bother? Some people are not allowed to install linux on their workstation but are given Ultra 5 workstations by default. Don't laugh!! This is the second corporation like this I have seen. Some people are unix heads and hate living in that split world of working in Windows while doing 90% of their work through a Secure CFT or Exceed window.

Hell, believe or not there are people out there who prefer the way *Nix desktops work despite any shortcomings.