that’s whacked

finally tried out brandz

Thursday, Mar 30. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

simon suggested a BrandZ demo would be uber-cool to present at FISL, so i finally tried it out.

not wanting to blow away and trash my current (nicely and freshly reinstalled) snv_36 install, i was stumped. but then i remembered the liveupgrade slice i had left myself. woohoo!

i lucreate’d my slice, which copied over my snv36 install. i then luactivate’d it, and booted into it. [nils](http://blogs.sun.com/nilsn] very conveniently informed me of their recent nv_35 syncup, so i bfu’d my LU slice down from onnv36 to onnv35 to make sure that worked before attempting the brandz bits. that worked quite nicely, so i re-bfu’d to the brandz35 bits, and voila! i’ve got a live-upgrade slice running brandz_35.

i booted into the new slice (thanks grub!), and installed my brand new Linux zone with CentOS, following ed p.‘s very helpful “Branded Zones on a Laptop” blog entry, and i was ready to go.

after that, i loopback mounted my home directory (from a zfs pool) to my zone, and tweaked my profile settings to compensate for the fact that they could be executed from a Linux zone as well as my Solaris host. ssh into the zone, and away we go!

so of course, the first thing i tried to do was run acroread. bork. it required GTK+ 2.4. bummer. so how the hell was everyone else running it? nils confirmed my guess and it looks like Acrobat Reader 7.0.5 requires GTK+ 2.4, whereas 7.0.1 is quite happy to run with GTK+ 2.2 which CentOS 3.5 comes with. so i rummaged around Adobe’s website and found the following download link to Acrobat Reader 7.0.1, downloaded that and yay! it works!

i have to say. i’m very impressed. this is uber-cool.

can’t wait to start playing with DTrace on Linux apps…