Unflushed Buffers

While mucking around with Solaris Express on my development system which up until recently was WinXP for embedded development, also kept me online with Skype.

Since I was booting into solaris I thought I’d try getting Skype running there as well.

Not a good idea. There is no solaris port but there are many problems getting it going in Solaris under a Linux BrandZ zone.

Getting the zones going was relatively straightforward. I got a Centos FS image from the Opensolaris website. Couldn’t find an rpm for skype on that early version of Centos so started looking at Centos 5.. but when I installed a Linux 2.6 zone I kept getting FATAL: kernel too old from zlogin. After sleeping on it, I realised that I was running snv_70b and Linux 2.6 experimental support.. Time to dump the DVD I got from a Linux magazine and download snv_86 build from Opensolaris.

4Gb later and the upgrade installed, I created a Linux 2.6 zone, after getting a template for it from the BrandZ site. I installed Centos5.0 in a virtual machine on another box here, tar’ed it up so I could install it in the zone and everything went fine. This time zlogin gave me a prompt and I was in business.

Zones are really cool, and pretty lightweight too even on this old box.

So now I can ssh into the Linux zone with -X for X11 forwarding. Time to install skype. I downloaded the rpm from Skype’s webpage and after updating Centos and installing the required dependencies, Skype loaded fine. No sound however, but I could chat.

I found this was because the new Skype versions use ALSA for their sound while the Solaris zone used OSS. Skype had a static OSS version 1.4 so I got that but it would segfault with some error from the RT library (RtError). That’s no good. It’s a step backwards.

I went back to the Centos3 Linux 2.4 zone and went looking for an old version of Skype that would work with it. After installing a bunch of libraries and finding some 1.2 and 1.3 versions on a GOPHER site of all places, I was almost in business. I just needed one more library. Then I found the exact same rpm that someone else in a forum had used and bingo, I was in business.

Skype logged in and I made a call to myself on another skype account on my main desktop. There was like a 4-5 second delay but it was clear and the sound worked, apart from the call sounding like it was being made from the International space station! I then called a friend with my Skypeout credit but voice packets must have been dropping because he said it was all clipped voice he couldn’t understand.

Turns out this is probably because there is a big latency as skype makes calls to OSS which is emulated in the Solaris zone (lag upon lag upon lag). At this point it seemed fruitless so I gave up, with Skype technically working (just not working well). The experiment was done, but in the process I learned myself some interesting things about how Solaris zones work and how cool they are.

The development box is an old 1.6Ghz AMD Athlon with 512mb RAM. So when I booted the Solaris install DVD I got dissed saying it needed minimum 768Mb RAM. Woah! I thought.. that’s pricey.. but it turns out that’s only necessary for the Java based installer (yep java is a memory hog).

So boot with the 2nd option in grub, and then select the 4th option for Solaris Interactive Install (Console session). It’s a straightforward text based installer and works a treat. When rebooting, XWindows and Gnome all work fine and reasonable performance. I won’t be doing much with Java at the moment.

Update: Later I downloaded build 86 of the Solaris Community Edition and the upgrade process via the text installer worked with no problems either. Just answer all the questions and go out for lunch while it works on replacing everything. Apparently if I’d used a hard drive bigger than 20gb (the only one I had lying around the place) it would install the upgrade on another partition and I could choose between the upgrade or original when rebooting.

Why not start it all off with a little rant while I get the server in order. TEST POST warning.

Sometimes I Digg.. for the articles of course. Today there was the usual post that crops up every month or so, trying to spread the good word of Linux and open source. This one was whinging about being unable to convince said colleague to give Linux a try because the nub party had bought into the whole FUD that ‘the man’ had put out there against a fine community of users and products. Moral of the story. Computers aren’t for everyone. Neither is Linux.

My response as follows, and I did post this comment as Serial Port:

Really… how many times have you written a hello world!\n source for a new language only to be dissed by the compiler/interpreter with a syntax error because your error correcting keyboard is on the fritz?

OK I’ve written some notes, and occasionally I have problems. This is a new blog to replace versions of the old. There are some articles in the archive I may resurrect from backup but new hard drive, new blog, new purpose.

Probably not going to be updated as regularly as you may like, but who cares, it’s my blog and I’ll not post to it if I want to.