/dev/dump

Today at the OpenStorage Summit 2010, I unveiled the new illumos logo. We will be updating our branding, which also includes a new font, and other elements, over the next few weeks. There were other updates on illumos that I covered in this talk. I think this was recorded, but I'm not sure right now where it was recorded and how to acces it. I'll be sure to share that when I find out.

I have an urgent need to rennovate the illumos website. If you'd like to help the project out, and you have got both time and talent, please let me know. A major overhaul of the site is in order, and we need someone willing to dedicate some time on it. There may be some funds available for the right person, but to be clear, illumos can't afford the services of a professional design bureau.

So I finally got tired of waiting for someone else to do a printf (1) replacement in illumos for the closed binary from Oracle. I had thought this would be a trivial thing to do via ksh93/libcmd using a symbolic link ala /usr/bin/alias. Lo and behold, it wasn't! Why? Because ksh93 printf insists (like all ksh93 builtins) on having -- and - getopt style processing. This is fundamentally incompatible with legacy printf. (Why does it do this? So it can dump its builtin man page, e.g. printf --man, to the console. A feature I've railed against in the past.) Here's what should happen: % printf -v -v% Here's what ksh93 does: garrett@thinkpad:~$ printf -v ksh93: printf: -v: unknown option Usage: printf [ options ] format [string ...] Now there is an argument to be made that a script which relies on the legacy behavior is fundamentally broken. But it doesn't matter -- the scripts are in the field (there are real exa...

I just pushed a major set of changes: 8 libc locale work needs updated license files 223 libc needs multibyte locale support for collation 225 libc locale binary files should be in native byte order 309 populate initial locales for illumos As a result, illumos has gained base support for some 157 different locales, spanning 67 languages and 116 different territories. This includes nearly all the major languages of the world -- missing are Serbian, Javanese, Farsi, Malaysian, Burmese, and some languages spoken in central and west Africa. (Some of these will be very easy for someone else to add... let me know if you want one of these and are willing to do the work.) The support for these locales includes full POSIX compliant collating support, which was completely absent in illumos before this integration. Also, included, is a new open source implementation of localedef (1). To my knowledge, this new implementation is the only non-GNU version of localedef that i...

For many years, I've been stuck with old xterm, because it was the only one that honored my Meta keys in the same way that GNU emacs did. I could never figure out how to make gnome-terminal work, which always bothered me somewhat. (Notably GNOME terminal has better Unicode support which has lately become important to me.) I finally found a reference that helped me out. I understood that the problem was conflicting ideas about modifier keys; gnome-terminal uses Mod1, but Emacs uses Mod4. What I didn't know was something I found out here , namely that Emacs only uses Mod4 if it exists. So a better solution for me is to simply clear Mod4 altogether, and both programs happily honor Mod1. (This leaves xterm hosed, but if gnome-terminal works, then I don't need xterm anymore.) My resulting .xmodmap looks like this: remove Lock = Caps_Lock keysym Caps_Lock = Control_L add Control = Control_L clear Mod4 This makes my PC keyboard behave sensibly. Alt is Meta. And Caps Lock i...