Re: [9fans] First-timer help

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[Ben Huntsman]

>unless/until we do a Xen dom0 for plan 9, which in fact would not be that 
>hard.

Anything like that in the works?  I'm not generally a Linux fan, and would be much more inclined to set up Xen if I could control it through Plan 9...

Speaking of which, though, I know this is nearly flame bait for sure,(but that's not my intent, and this list keeps things pretty professional) but since I respect your opinion and am sure you've a justifiable reason, what Linux do you use?  Thanks!

-Ben

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[Ronald G. Minnich]

On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, Ben Huntsman wrote:

> Anything like that in the works?  I'm not generally a Linux fan, and
> would be much more inclined to set up Xen if I could control it through
> Plan 9...

need volunteers. 

> Speaking of which, though, I know this is nearly flame bait for
> sure,(but that's not my intent, and this list keeps things pretty
> professional) but since I respect your opinion and am sure you've a
> justifiable reason, what Linux do you use?  Thanks!

I have no good reasons, but currently use suse 9.something. I mainly use
that because Erik hendriks used it, and I needed his kernel patches etc.  
to work, so decided to stay bug-compatible (not that suse is more or less
buggy than anything else -- it's pretty good).

Ollie Lo, whom I respect very highly, is pretty happy with FC3 and now 
FC4, in spite of some problems with udev. 

I keep thinking about gentoo, since I really still like freebsd better and
gentoo reminds me of the freebsd ports collection. There are days I miss
from my old job which involved a lot of FreeBSD work ...

ron

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[Jack Johnson]

On 7/19/05, Ronald G. Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov> wrote:
> I keep thinking about gentoo, since I really still like freebsd better and
> gentoo reminds me of the freebsd ports collection. There are days I miss
> from my old job which involved a lot of FreeBSD work ...

I don't use it, but you may be interested in Crux:

http://www.crux.nu/

-Jack

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[Russ Cox]

> I keep thinking about gentoo, since I really still like freebsd better and
> gentoo reminds me of the freebsd ports collection. There are days I miss
> from my old job which involved a lot of FreeBSD work ...

Gentoo and FreeBSD ports are both getting to be a little ridiculous.
I mean, really, why should I have to compile Firefox in order to install
it on my laptop?  Let someone else waste the hours of cpu time to
compile it and the libraries it rides in on.  All I want is a binary.

I watched a FreeBSD user install the latest gaim from ports.
It was funny.  It took at least an hour.  Compare with the equivalent
on a binary package system like Debian:

x40=; 9 time sudo apt-get install -y gaim
...
Need to get 4719kB of archives.
After unpacking 3277kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://debian.lcs.mit.edu testing/main gaim-data 1:1.3.1-2 [3075kB]
Get:2 http://debian.lcs.mit.edu testing/main libao2 0.8.6-1 [23.2kB]
Get:3 http://debian.lcs.mit.edu testing/main libaspell15
0.60.2+20050121-3 [669kB]
Get:4 http://debian.lcs.mit.edu testing/main libatk1.0-0 1.10.1-2 [68.5kB]
Get:5 http://debian.lcs.mit.edu testing/main gaim 1:1.3.1-2 [883kB]
Fetched 4719kB in 13s (344kB/s)
...
Setting up gaim-data (1.3.1-2) ...
Setting up libao2 (0.8.6-1) ...
Setting up libaspell15 (0.60.2+20050121-3) ...
Setting up libatk1.0-0 (1.10.1-2) ...
Setting up gaim (1.3.1-2) ...
1.39u 1.66s 67.95r 	 sudo apt-get install -y gaim ...
x40=; 

A minute vs. an hour is significant.

Russ

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[Ronald G. Minnich]

On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, Russ Cox wrote:

> Gentoo and FreeBSD ports are both getting to be a little ridiculous.

yep, that's the downside, and why I haven't booted gentoo. I really don't 
need to recompile X11 for that matter. There's almost a point of religion 
in some places about recompiling your whole box from scratch. It makes no 
sense to me. 

The upside is not having to fool with RPM dependencies when I want a 
packet. emerge whatever. It can be nice. 

So, at least part of the appeal is being able to say 'install that there
thing" and not worry about where that thing and all the stuff it depends
on might be. Which is where apt-get can be nice. The suse interface
(YaST2) to this type of thing is not bad.

ron

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[Martin C. Atkins]

On Tue, 19 Jul 2005 10:23:16 -0600 (MDT) "Ronald G. Minnich" <rminnich@lanl.gov> wrote:
>..
> The upside is not having to fool with RPM dependencies when I want a 
> packet. emerge whatever. It can be nice. 

Sorry folks, but I can't resist:

But that is exactly what a better-designed binary package system,
such as Debian's apt, gives you. I've never had to "fool with deb
dependencies" in >3 years use (and I install a lot of packages :-).

OK - that's enough advocacy.

Martin

-- 
Martin C. Atkins			martin_ml@parvat.com
Parvat Infotech Private Limited		http://www.parvat.com{/,/martin}

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[Bakul Shah]

> > I keep thinking about gentoo, since I really still like freebsd better and
> > gentoo reminds me of the freebsd ports collection. There are days I miss
> > from my old job which involved a lot of FreeBSD work ...
> 
> Gentoo and FreeBSD ports are both getting to be a little ridiculous.
> I mean, really, why should I have to compile Firefox in order to install
> it on my laptop?  Let someone else waste the hours of cpu time to
> compile it and the libraries it rides in on.  All I want is a binary.

You don't have to compile any port locally.  You can do, e.g.,
 
    pkg_add -r gaim

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[andrey mirtchovski]

> Gentoo and FreeBSD ports are both getting to be a little ridiculous.
> I mean, really, why should I have to compile Firefox in order to install
> it on my laptop?  

not that it matters much in the context of 9fans, but one can install
binary packages from compiled ports without much difficulty in
freebsd, just the command is different than 'make'.

i run Fedora on my home computers, the university machines are slowly
being switched to suse just because it's slightly more gui-sh to
administer.  not that it matters much -- nobody really cares about
what's running underneath, as long as it doesn't require reboots every
week.  almost everyone here operates their desktop machines as
glorified xterms (read: xterms that can play music and browse the web)
to the cluster nodes.  

my desktop at ucalgary is a big drawterm to the plan9 server.  the
current incarnation of the drawterm i'm typing this email in was
started on July 7th.

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[Devon H. O'Dell]

On Tue, 2005-07-19 at 09:10, Russ Cox wrote:
> > I keep thinking about gentoo, since I really still like freebsd better and
> > gentoo reminds me of the freebsd ports collection. There are days I miss
> > from my old job which involved a lot of FreeBSD work ...
> 
> Gentoo and FreeBSD ports are both getting to be a little ridiculous.
> I mean, really, why should I have to compile Firefox in order to install
> it on my laptop?  Let someone else waste the hours of cpu time to
> compile it and the libraries it rides in on.  All I want is a binary.
> 
> I watched a FreeBSD user install the latest gaim from ports.
> It was funny.  It took at least an hour.  Compare with the equivalent
> on a binary package system like Debian:

Not to be coy, but:

pkg_add -rv gaim?

I don't think the FreeBSD user in question was very experienced. Also, as long as the ABI hasn't changed, one can also usually download packages from the -CURRENT port snapshot, if the ones snapshotted at -RELEASE are outdated.

-Devon

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[David Leimbach]

On 7/19/05, Devon H. O'Dell <dodell@offmyserver.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-07-19 at 09:10, Russ Cox wrote:
> > > I keep thinking about gentoo, since I really still like freebsd better and
> > > gentoo reminds me of the freebsd ports collection. There are days I miss
> > > from my old job which involved a lot of FreeBSD work ...
> >
> > Gentoo and FreeBSD ports are both getting to be a little ridiculous.
> > I mean, really, why should I have to compile Firefox in order to install
> > it on my laptop?  Let someone else waste the hours of cpu time to
> > compile it and the libraries it rides in on.  All I want is a binary.
> >
> > I watched a FreeBSD user install the latest gaim from ports.
> > It was funny.  It took at least an hour.  Compare with the equivalent
> > on a binary package system like Debian:
> 
> Not to be coy, but:
> 
> pkg_add -rv gaim?
> 
> I don't think the FreeBSD user in question was very experienced. Also, as long as the ABI hasn't changed, one can also usually download packages from the -CURRENT port snapshot, if the ones snapshotted at -RELEASE are outdated.

Not to mention FreeBSD now has binary updates for security patches.  I
think this is a huge step forward for sysadmins of FreeBSD systems
everywhere.

Not to mention the fact that I installed what was supposed to be a
"demo box" for a bugtracker at work over 2 years ago and I almost
forgot about it cuz the sucker never dies!

I've yet to have such an experience with ANY version of linux due to
weird kernel mishaps.  Many of my linux zealot buddies really think
"the last great linux kernel" was 2.0.36 :).  I have to admit though,
that when it comes to hardware driver support, linux is currently the
winner.

Dave

> 
> -Devon
> 
>

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[Devon H. O'Dell]

On Tue, 2005-07-19 at 13:08, David Leimbach wrote:
> Not to mention FreeBSD now has binary updates for security patches.  I
> think this is a huge step forward for sysadmins of FreeBSD systems
> everywhere.

Yes, Colin Percival did a great job at making this. BSdiff was actually invented for his thesis.

> Not to mention the fact that I installed what was supposed to be a
> "demo box" for a bugtracker at work over 2 years ago and I almost
> forgot about it cuz the sucker never dies!
> 
> I've yet to have such an experience with ANY version of linux due to
> weird kernel mishaps.  Many of my linux zealot buddies really think
> "the last great linux kernel" was 2.0.36 :).  I have to admit though,
> that when it comes to hardware driver support, linux is currently the
> winner.

I still have to disagree with this (for PC hardware). We see here that Linux frequently has poor support / broken support for much of the PC server hardware we sell here. FreeBSD tends to work better / faster / more reliably on the same hardware than Linux does. If Linux even works at all (and I mean in general: we get installation requests for RHEL, FCn, SuSE, Debian, and others).

> Dave

--Devon

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[William K. Josephson]

On Tue, Jul 19, 2005 at 12:10:40PM -0400, Russ Cox wrote:
> > I keep thinking about gentoo, since I really still like freebsd better and
> > gentoo reminds me of the freebsd ports collection. There are days I miss
> > from my old job which involved a lot of FreeBSD work ...
> 
> Gentoo and FreeBSD ports are both getting to be a little ridiculous.
> I mean, really, why should I have to compile Firefox in order to install
> it on my laptop?  Let someone else waste the hours of cpu time to
> compile it and the libraries it rides in on.  All I want is a binary.
 
> A minute vs. an hour is significant.

Then why not take the binary packages from the package build cluster?

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[David Leimbach]

On 7/19/05, Ronald G. Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, Ben Huntsman wrote:
> 
> > Anything like that in the works?  I'm not generally a Linux fan, and
> > would be much more inclined to set up Xen if I could control it through
> > Plan 9...
> 
> need volunteers.
> 

I guess it's difficult to speculate, but do you foresee any problems
with paravirtualization performance running with Plan 9 as Dom0?  I
know with "regular virtualization" I've seen awfully bad performance
of Inferno, at least in the handling of mouse interrupts and graphics.

I'm wondering how this will play into the DomUs in Xen.

> > Speaking of which, though, I know this is nearly flame bait for
> > sure,(but that's not my intent, and this list keeps things pretty
> > professional) but since I respect your opinion and am sure you've a
> > justifiable reason, what Linux do you use?  Thanks!
> 
> I have no good reasons, but currently use suse 9.something. I mainly use
> that because Erik hendriks used it, and I needed his kernel patches etc.
> to work, so decided to stay bug-compatible (not that suse is more or less
> buggy than anything else -- it's pretty good).
> 
> Ollie Lo, whom I respect very highly, is pretty happy with FC3 and now
> FC4, in spite of some problems with udev.
> 
> I keep thinking about gentoo, since I really still like freebsd better and
> gentoo reminds me of the freebsd ports collection. There are days I miss
> from my old job which involved a lot of FreeBSD work ...

Indeed, I too am a fan of everything FreeBSD over Linux these days,
right down to the license.  It's just a shame that FreeBSD 6.0
snapshots can't seem to negotiate with my KVM or I'd be running it on
something other than my PowerBook [which has a pretty solid port right
now... needs some hardware support but is coming along nicely]

Also, due to momentum in the market, I have to devote most of my life
to working on Linux related software and stuff.  My only real break
from it is Mac OS X which I also support at work for our MPI
implementations.

Haven't honestly tried Gentoo in a long while, I've heard they have
binary packages and such that don't suck as badly as they did when I
tested a pre-release long ago.  It's probably worth another look, but
I honestly think they try to be too modular. [too many choices for
things like system loggers... pick one and do it right :)]

Dave

> 
> ron
>

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[Ronald G. Minnich]

On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, David Leimbach wrote:

> I guess it's difficult to speculate, but do you foresee any problems
> with paravirtualization performance running with Plan 9 as Dom0?  I know
> with "regular virtualization" I've seen awfully bad performance of
> Inferno, at least in the handling of mouse interrupts and graphics.

it's really hard to speculate. I note that ia64 now runs under xen and 
guest OSes run with no mods, and do have graphics/mouse/etc. I have no 
ia64 boxes any more, so have no idea how well this works. 

> Also, due to momentum in the market, I have to devote most of my life to
> working on Linux related software and stuff.  My only real break from it
> is Mac OS X which I also support at work for our MPI implementations.

Actually the 'binary package' discussion of the last few days got me to
thinking about an interesting thing I have noticed in recent year or two.
>From what I have seen, software is getting less portable and harder to
compile. For a few years in the 90s, I had a mixed linux/freebsd cluster,
and the observation was that before the monoculture hit, a lot of tools
would compile fairly well on both systems with no mods.

Then, a while back, things started getting to the point where they compile
well on linux, but maybe not quite so well on xyzbsd. "Oh, you means
there's an OS other than Linux?". Little linux-specific bits started to
creep in -- usually include file stuff, sometimes network related stuff.

Nowadays, I see things that won't compile on "this Linux" but will compile 
on "that Linux". 2 days ago I had something that would not compile because 
my autoconf was 2.57, not 2.59. 

So, is it a proper use of the word ironic if autoconf, designed to make 
code location-independent, is itself failing because autoconf itself has 
become very version-sensitive? Inquiring non-english-majors want to know!

ron

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[andrey mirtchovski]

> So, is it a proper use of the word ironic if autoconf, designed to make 
> code location-independent, is itself failing because autoconf itself has 
> become very version-sensitive? Inquiring non-english-majors want to know!

yes, in the sense that it's "poignantly contrary to what was expected
or intended" :)

then again, some may expect all linux (or indeed all software) tools
to fail.

/non-english-major

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[Charles Forsyth]

>>So, is it a proper use of the word ironic if autoconf, designed to make 
>>code location-independent, is itself failing because autoconf itself has 
>>become very version-sensitive? Inquiring non-english-majors want to know!

it might be `ironic' if `autoconf' had ever met its notional specification.
`autoconf' is not even an `oxymoron', just a `moron'.  actually, i suppose `idiot savant' might
be most accurate: it's really a collection of all the recipes they've met so far, but give
it something new or a revision of something old, and it is completely lost.
it has far too many peculiar details built in to it.

admittedly, it's not helped by programmers who, for instance, conditionally
use either gettimeofday or time when they only want time to the second,
thus requiring a configuration choice between them.

perhaps `moron' was right, too:
	1	
	  Mo"ron (?), n. (Pedagogy) A person whose intellectual development
	proceeds normally up to about the eighth year of age and is then
	arrested so that there is little or no further development.

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[David Leimbach]

On Jul 20, 2005, at 1:46 AM, Charles Forsyth wrote:

>>> So, is it a proper use of the word ironic if autoconf, designed  
>>> to make
>>> code location-independent, is itself failing because autoconf  
>>> itself has
>>> become very version-sensitive? Inquiring non-english-majors want  
>>> to know!
>>>
>
> it might be `ironic' if `autoconf' had ever met its notional  
> specification.
> `autoconf' is not even an `oxymoron', just a `moron'.  actually, i  
> suppose `idiot savant' might
> be most accurate: it's really a collection of all the recipes  
> they've met so far, but give
> it something new or a revision of something old, and it is  
> completely lost.
> it has far too many peculiar details built in to it.

Yep, and getting new OSes supported "upstream" is way more of a  
hassle than it should be
for such a tool.

I doubt DragonflyBSD ever gets its stuff detected or installed  
properly without patching.

Dave

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[Brian L. Stuart]

In message <Pine.LNX.4.58.0507190957300.18527@enigma.lanl.gov>, "Ronald G. Minn
ich" writes:
>I keep thinking about gentoo, since I really still like freebsd better and
>gentoo reminds me of the freebsd ports collection. There are days I miss
>from my old job which involved a lot of FreeBSD work ...

It just so happens that I'm using a laptop with gentoo and
I'm running Plan 9 with xen on it.  The reason I tried
gentoo was much like your motivation.

I do agree somewhat with the other comments about it.  It
just seems to be less unplesant than the other distributions.
The recompile pain on update isn't as bad as one would
expect.  One of the things I do on Friday mornings at work
is to start an update in one window.  While it's running,
I do other stuff and it rarely takes longer than some of
my other tasks.  Even when something like mozilla gets updated,
it's generally done before I get back from lunch.

One thing I've seen with the Linux-xen-Plan 9 combo is
the laptop running a bit hot.  For reasons I haven't
figured out, the Plan 9 domain gets constant CPU time
even when it's idle.  Even the load monitor in Plan 9
says that the load average is about 0.5.  I kind of
hoped that this was just an artifact of the first cut
and that it might disappear with the xen v3 port.  Is
that a vain hope?

Thanks,
BLS

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[Ronald G. Minnich]

On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, Brian L. Stuart wrote:

> One thing I've seen with the Linux-xen-Plan 9 combo is the laptop
> running a bit hot.  For reasons I haven't figured out, the Plan 9 domain
> gets constant CPU time even when it's idle.

and here I thought I fixed that. Hmm, I think I did. How old is your xen 
lashup?


anyway, let me know if you are on an old version -- I had a bug in the 
idle code, or a misunderstanding really -- and I did fix that. Fix is on 
sources.

That said, Xen does NOT do ACPI. Xen 2.0 laptops run hot. This is fixed in 
3.0, I think.

ron

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[Brian L. Stuart]

In message <Pine.LNX.4.58.0507192245470.19744@enigma.lanl.gov>, "Ronald G. Minn
ich" writes:
>On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, Brian L. Stuart wrote:
>
>> One thing I've seen with the Linux-xen-Plan 9 combo is the laptop
>> running a bit hot.  For reasons I haven't figured out, the Plan 9 domain
>> gets constant CPU time even when it's idle.
>
>and here I thought I fixed that. Hmm, I think I did. How old is your xen 
>lashup?

Actually, the xen patches are several months old.  The
Plan 9 kernel is from June.  Is it dependent on the version
of xen I use?  I think the one that I'm running is 2.0.4.

>anyway, let me know if you are on an old version -- I had a bug in the 
>idle code, or a misunderstanding really -- and I did fix that. Fix is on 
>sources.

The kernel images appear to be the same ones I have and the
source files seem to be at least as old as what I have.
This is the stuff in /n/sources/xen, right?

>That said, Xen does NOT do ACPI. Xen 2.0 laptops run hot. This is fixed in 
>3.0, I think.

I'm looking forward to that.  At that point, I'll probably be
able to justify booting into xen/Linux/Plan9 all the time.
Do you have any inside knowledge on when 3.0 is likely to
see the light of day?

Thanks,
BLS

[9fans] xen

[Tim Newsham]

> Do you have any inside knowledge on when 3.0 is likely to
> see the light of day?

If I took a wild guess I would say its probably about 3 full-time
weeks of work.  I may be able to get most of it done in august.
This guess could be way off base.  Of course if others are interested
in contributing it could go faster.

> BLS

Tim Newsham
http://www.lava.net/~newsham/

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[Ronald G. Minnich]

On Wed, 20 Jul 2005, Brian L. Stuart wrote:

> Actually, the xen patches are several months old.  The Plan 9 kernel is
> from June.  Is it dependent on the version of xen I use?  I think the
> one that I'm running is 2.0.4.

no, the problem was only in the Plan 9 kernel. My bad. by June, I am 
pretty sure "the fix was in".

I can't get to sources right now, but will try later and get you a copy of 
the "right" code so you can check. 

> I'm looking forward to that.  At that point, I'll probably be
> able to justify booting into xen/Linux/Plan9 all the time.

it's nice, it's how I run my laptop all the time now. I'm always Xen'ed 
up. I only let Linux have 256MB, and it works, as my window manager is now 
rio. 

> Do you have any inside knowledge on when 3.0 is likely to see the light
> of day?

it's out in -test form. It is still shaking quite a bit from aftershock. 
The Plan 9 port is still quite undone, however. 

ron

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[Brian L. Stuart]

In message <Pine.LNX.4.58.0507202059130.22342@enigma.lanl.gov>, "Ronald G. Minn
ich" writes:
>no, the problem was only in the Plan 9 kernel. My bad. by June, I am 
>pretty sure "the fix was in".

While I pulled it in June, the date of the image on sources is
April 27.

>I can't get to sources right now, but will try later and get you a copy of 
>the "right" code so you can check. 

So far I've only used the binary kernel image in 9xenf,
but of course, I'll be glad to build another kernel if
you find some patchs that fell through the cracks.

Thanks,
BLS

Re: [9fans] First-timer help

[Tim Newsham]

>> unless/until we do a Xen dom0 for plan 9, which in fact would not be that
>> hard.
>
> Anything like that in the works?  I'm not generally a Linux fan, and 
> would be much more inclined to set up Xen if I could control it through 
> Plan 9...

If linux is the main thing keeping you away from xen, consider
netbsd.  Hopefully there will be a FreeBSD dom0 in the not
too distant future.

> -Ben

Tim Newsham
http://www.lava.net/~newsham/