Changing resolution to 1024x768 in solaris

As i have started fiddling with solaris these days, i am trying to make certain things perfect in my system.After installing the solaris i borrowed the perl script from Pradhap devarajan'blog and used it to set certain initial settings like having my home mapped to root directory etc...( yeah i am yet to create a normal user, again because of procastination :( ) after that i still had some problems withe the GUI.it had options only for a 800x600 resolution so again i mailed in the mailing list and got help from pradhap. i first ran kdmconfig to select Xorg to be used instead of Xsun.then i ran the xorgconfig to create a xorg.conf in /etc/X11 which would not be created by default.then it started asking the details od mouse,keyboard,video card,moniter etc.then it eventually wrote the xorg.conf.then i looked for something like /etc/init.d/gdm restart but could not. so CTRL+ALT+Backspace did the trick.i rebooted and then changed the screen resoultion to 1024x768 which was not available before.and hey presto i got the thing what i wanted.but only one problem i did not specify the keyboard properly cos of this it echoed some other alphabets while typing. hence i reconfigured from start and specified the correct keyboard and there i got the perfect looking and working system.

I still have some questions why is that no console appears when CTRL+ALT+F1....F6 is pressed.should i have to setup something to enable it.also my audio driver needs some GStreamer plugin it seems.should configure that thing soon.i am yet to figure out how to start and stop services here in solaris.cos in init.d i could not find many of the services starting and stoping scripts.The mailing list ug-madosug is the place where i would be discovering these answers :)

Fame is the part of the game

Another great thing happened this week in my life which needs special mention here.i had earlier recounted the opensolaris day at TCE and it attracted the view of many icons in the OpenSolaris world.Thanks to Ananth who had provided a link to mine in his blog.The people who commented on that particular article was poker (joe) and Jim Grisanzio, Engineering Community Manager for OpenSolaris.we exchanged some mails between us and we agreed to create Mad-OSUG (MADurai - OpenSolaris User Group) in the opensolaris.org itself.Soon i created the website at http://opensolaris.org/os/community/os_user_groups/mad-osug/ and a mailing list at http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/ug-madosug is ready too. i heard from ananth that i am the 11th non-Sun leader to coordinate a Open-Solaris UserGroup.one of the people above me (the 10 people) is Peter Baer Galvin the person who wrote the Operating Systems book which i read :) and i have been mentioned in Jim Grisanzio's blog too.

Solaris in my Grub atlast

Eventhough i had installed solaris on more than 5 systems in the lab the attempt that i did on my system proved to be very tough.my hard disk was not properly partitioned right from the day i got it. (2 hard disk with 20GB + 40 GB hard disk) I left that work for later day but this procastination is the villian.lazily i just cleared one partition for solaris and tried installing but i had problems with the boot_archive.so i tried once again by around 3 am and i slept leaving the installation to happen.i dont know what was wrong with my system but when i got up a mere 800 MB was installed out of 4120MB. i switched it off and started to college. that night again i sat and started installing, everything went on well till the last 10 MB was about to be installed power went off and my screen went blank. i got wild with rage cos of the fate and went to bed. Next day evening i fully formatted my 20GB disk and used 10 GB for debian GNU/Linux(which i installed again) and 10 GB for Solaris.now my 40 GB has got 5 partitions for Windows XP. Atlast i succeeded in installing solaris in my system.i copied the splash image from belenix and is using that in my GRUB :) My friends on seeing my system booting with that Splash image and also the three OS available in my system could not prevent from letting out the words "oh my my"

My Article in Linux for U journal

Someday in the month of june or july i received a forward mail in one of the Glug mailing list. it was a casual letter requesting people in the community to provide information about the GNU/Linux in educational institutions.i saw that and promptly replied back detailing all that we have done in our college using FOSS ie Centralized Authentication System using Heimdal Kerberos,OpenLDAP,Samba(Single Sign On for all unix based and windows platform Systems and for other services in college like intranet portal,mailserver,shell server and all services to come in the future he he), TCENet web portal(using Python,Cheetah,Postgresql),TCE MailServer (Exim,cyrus,squirrelmail) etc... with that i forgot all about it until my cell phone rang on August 5th..

It was stylesen from Bangalore & he informed that my article has been published in Linux for U journal.With him was Sap,Keyankay too..imagine the amount of excitement i would have had,a simple unknowing work of gesture has rewarded me a lot.i bought that journal and showed that to all. A xerox copy of it still finds a place in my department notice board.This is one of the things which i would not forget in my life.