I was in the mood to refresh a few of my Xen virtual machines, and saw that Ubuntu 11.04 had been released, so I figured I’d give it a try. Ubuntu has typically been pretty decent under Xen, working well as either a hardware virtualized (HVM) or paravirtualized (PV) guest, but standards appear to have slipped with this latest release. I ran into problems with natty properly detecting and using both the NIC and the hard disk at multiple points in the install and setup. The instructions below will walk you through setting up a paravirtualized guest running Ubuntu 11.04. The instructions are pretty standard for any moderately recent release of Ubuntu or Debian, with the gotcha’s specific to Ubuntu 11.04 specifically marked.
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Author: Mike
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Ubuntu Natty Narwhal and Xen
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CyanogenMod 7 On Rogers Captivate
The CMSGS team has for the last month been releasing beta versions of their port of CyanogenMod for the Samsung Galaxy S line of phones, including the Captivate. CyanogenMod is interesting because it is the first ROM for the SGS that can actually be described as developed by real developers. They have taken the source code for Gingerbread on the Nexus S posted by Google to git.android.kernel.org, and have been actively porting it to the SGS hardware.
Previous ROMs for the SGS lineup have been more accurately described as “cooked” by “ROM chefs”, as opposed to developed. Essentially these chefs take already compiled versions of the ROMs released by carriers, unzip them, strip out the crap apps, add a custom theme, and a kernel, zip it back up, and call it a new ROM. The only real development was happening on the kernels, for which Samsung had to release the source code. But CyanogenMod is built entirely from source, not just the kernel. It’s a far more ambitious project.
If you’re interested in trying out CyanogenMod, the install instructions, necessary files, and known bugs can all be found in this post on the CyanogenMod forums. Please, read ALL of the post, and DO do the optional step of installing the Gapps, unless you like the idea of not having the Android Market. Please note that this is still a beta release, and the battery life is poor. But it’s getting better with each release.
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Oracle’s Möbius Strip Of Stupidity
I need to patch and update some Solaris/SPARC boxes, using the latest Solaris Patch Cluster from Oracle. Nevermind the flash animation that their support website consists of, the best part of the process so far has been this: The zip file that the patch cluster is distributed as is continually failing to unzip successfully on the box. So I finally just unzipped it on my laptop. It unzipped fine. I checked the README file, and I found this:
If you experience problems unzipping this patch cluster please refer to MOS article 1020109.1 ‘Unzip of Solaris 10 Recommended Patch Clusters and Solaris 10 Sun Alert Patch Clusters fails’, available from:
Which contains this helpful explaination:
The size of the Solaris 10 patch clusters now exceeds the size limit for the standard unzip utility. Patches need to be applied to resolve this issue.
It’s like a Möbius strip of stupidity.
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Removing The AT&T Boot Screen From A Samsung Captivate
Anyone who has played around with custom ROMs on their Samsung Captivate (particularly if you started with the Rogers SGH-I896) knows that there is an AT&T logo when you first boot the phone. It’s mildly annoying for those of us who don’t actually have an AT&T phone. Well, I’ve found a solution.
First, an explanation of how the boot sequence works. When you first power on the phone, it’s the responsibility of the boot loader (similar to a BIOS on a regular computer*) to display an initial graphic on the display. The boot loader then loads the kernel, and then it’s the kernels turn to display a graphic on the screen. The kernel loads the rest of the ROM, and then the ROM gets a chance to display a boot logo or even boot animation. The instructions below will show you how to change the first boot logo.
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Bufferbloat: Finally It Has A Name
I’ve seen an explosion of discussion in the last couple of days regarding something called Bufferbloat. It seems that Bell Labs’ Jim Gettys has been investigating poor network performance at his house, and has stumbled onto a network phenomenon that he’s termed bufferbloat. Essentially, bufferbloat is when networks are configured with excessive buffers which leads (perhaps counter-intuitively) to poor network performance.
Jim has written a series of blog posts as he has investigated this problem. You can find them all here. He freely admits that he’s not the first to have stumbled across this problem, though he certainly seems to have successfully coined the best term for it. Bufferbloat has in fact long been identified as an issue by those who build their own routers. I remember reading about the phenomenon years ago (though it did not have a name at the time) and avoiding bufferbloat has in fact been the cornerstone of my own home network configurations for over five years now.