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.