Saturday, November 19, 2005

Bringing Microsoft webcore fonts to Solaris Desktop

There are not so many things from Microsoft that I like. In fact there is, probably, only one thing - webcore font set. Verdana looks great in the browser. And for those who read Hebrew web sites it is almost impossible to view them with other fonts - they are all created using Verdana fonts. So a couple of day ago, when I installed Solaris on my laptop I decided to get these fonts working.
The fonts used to be available from Microsoft' web site for free download. However, at some point they removed the files. I am not sure what the legal status of these fonts today, but you can download them from a number of places. I've got mine here.

So if someone wants to do it here is the recipe.

1. Download the fonts archive and open it, say in /var/tmp
2. Create directory /usr/share/fonts/webcore and /usr/share/doc/webcore-fonts
3. Move fonts from webcore-fonts/fonts to /usr/share/fonts/webcore
4. Move docs from webcore-fonts/doc to /usr/share/doc/webcore-fonts
5. TrueType fonts need fonts.scale file. If you have ttmkfdir utility use it to create it. Otherwise get the file from here. Put the file into /usr/share/fonts/webcore
6. Run mkfontdir -
/usr/openwin/bin/mkfontdir /usr/share/fonts/webcore

7. Tell your fc-cache where to find these fonts.
7a. Put local.conf into /etc/fonts
7b. If you use Blastwave put it also in /opt/csw/etc/fontconfig

8. Restart the fc-cache to make sure it picks up new fonts.
8a. svcadm restart fc-cache
8b. /etc/init.d/cswfconfig start


Now you may want to restart your browser to reconfigure it for using Verdana. The example here shows my Firefox configuration. I have to add that these fonts look really good on laptop 1024x768 LCD screen.



Also I am not an expert in font configuration, so if you know a simpler or cleaner way of installing fonts, please let me know.

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Friday, November 18, 2005

B27, ZFS, iwi, Athlon X2, etc

So many things happened this week - Miluim (military reserve service), build 27 released (ZFS), wireless drivers for Intel chipset finally hit the street (finally dumped FC4 from my laptop and installed Solaris), Athlon 64 X2 arrived for my office machine. And finally caught a flu at the end of the week :( Too many things to handle... The good thing, however, is that I writing this blog entry on my IBM ThinkPad T43 running Solaris Express B27 with iwi wireless driver - the only thing that I really miss is Skype.


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Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Solaris Express Community Edition b27a

Build 27 seems to be available. Note that files are named sol-nv-b27a-... Is it a respin of original build 27 ? Quick package list diff shows ZFS and Realtek gigabit driver were added.
Installing it right now on my new Athlon X2 machine...

Friday, November 04, 2005

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Installing Solaris on FC storage with MPxIO

This evening I got another IBM Blade server HS20 with FC HBA. I wanted to install Solaris on it and suddenly I realized that it is a great opportunity to test install/boot from FC storage. Fortunately I had a DS4300 storage array connected to the system with some spare space left on one of its volume groups. I tried that kind of installation about a year ago, but until new boot was integrated into Solaris booting from FC HBA had little chances to success.
So I booted the Blade from the CDROM and it readily presented the FC disk as a choice for the installation. It worth noting that DS4300 is connected via two controllers, so MPxIO merged two hardware nodes into one virtual. This very long name c5t600A0B800019D82F000014804368A7C0d0 is the name of the disk based on its GUID rather then on WWPN. DS4300 is an Active/Standby box, however MPxIO supports these kind of controller (Engenio-based) pretty well. So the installation went ahead and I went to drink tea. 10 minutes later it was over and after reboot I enabled the BIOS on QLogic FC HBA card and set the FC node and LUN to boot from. That's was it. Everything just played happily along.


Here it is after the reboot:
# uname -a
SunOS b7 5.11 snv_25 i86pc i386 i86pc


And look where the root filesystem is mounted -
# df -h /
Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c5t600A0B800019D82F000014804368A7C0d0s0
14G 2.7G 11G 20% /


Now, what constitutes that virtual disk
# luxadm disp /dev/rdsk/c5t600A0B800019D82F000014804368A7C0d0s2
DEVICE PROPERTIES for disk: /dev/rdsk/c5t600A0B800019D82F000014804368A7C0d0s2
Vendor: IBM
Product ID: 1722-600
Revision: 0520
Serial Num: 1T53176260
Unformatted capacity: 16384.000 MBytes
Write Cache: Enabled
Read Cache: Enabled
Minimum prefetch: 0x100
Maximum prefetch: 0x100
Device Type: Disk device
Path(s):

/dev/rdsk/c5t600A0B800019D82F000014804368A7C0d0s2
/devices/scsi_vhci/disk@g600a0b800019d82f000014804368a7c0:c,raw
Controller /dev/cfg/c3
Device Address 200600a0b819d830,0
Host controller port WWN 2100000d6050ec96
Class primary
State ONLINE
Controller /dev/cfg/c3
Device Address 200700a0b819d830,0
Host controller port WWN 2100000d6050ec96
Class secondary
State STANDBY

Overall impression: very smooth integration of FC multipathing into boot subsystem. Many thanks to all the Sun' engineers involved with this framework.


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