Flashplayer for Firefox & Opera on OpenSolaris

As you know OpenSoalris comes with Firefox browser, however it doesn't include Adobe flashplayer plugin so you can't see any flash-based contents like watching video clips on YouTube.

If you are a novice to OpenSolaris, here you can find basic instructions of how to install flashplayer on Opera and Firefox on OpenSolaris.

In order to install Adobe Falshplayer you have to download the Solaris version of flashplayer from Adobe website here .

If you go on the default download page like the one above you need to choose 'Different operating systems or browsers'.

Choose 'Solaris' from the drop-down list.

Choose x86 from the second box unless you have a Sparc system. Click on 'Agree and install now' and then 'save file'. Here I saved the file on my 'Desktop'.

What you just downloaded is a zipped folder with .bz2 extension. You need to right click on the zipped file and then choose 'Extract Here'. Now your files are extracted into a folder with the same name on your desktop. There are two files in that folder and we are interested in 'libflashplayer.so'.

Then go on the Terminal. login as super-user: type SU and then enter your root password if there is any. In this stage you have to copy the file (libflashplayer.so) into the plugins folder of your Firefox.

type : CP (address of the extracted file) (space) (address of plugins folder of firefox)

In this case it is:

CP
/export/home/tiger/Desktop/flash_player_solaris _r151_x86/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/

Note: Tiger is my username, you can replace that with your own username if everything else is the same.

You shouldn't get any errors and after you enter the command it should be like above.

OPERA :
Opera is also available for OpenSolaris.

Choose the latest version for Solaris which is 9.63.

The same instructions apply to opera browser but instead of the plugins folder of firefox, you need to enter the address of opera plugins folder.

ZFS & Dtrace Rock

Have you ever lost valuable data? Well, it happens to everyone...However with ZFS the probability goes down to zero..

ZFS is a new file system developed by Sun Microsystems providing a fundamentally new approach to data management . Whatever the situation, with ZFS you can always roll back to previous versions of your data or in other words 'restore' it.

With ZFS not only do you always have automatic backups but also it provides higher level of security. These are not the only features, there is a number of additional advantages which are becoming more evident to many big vendors but is out of the scope of this post.

Nowadays an ever increasing number of companies are turning to Sun Microsystems to help them achieve more reliable storage solutions and higher security.

Apart from this fantastic storage solution, Sun provides a powerful tool called 'Dtrace' which can be used on MySql to estimate or monitor the execution times of the query parsing or even to determine whether query uses query catch or not.

Tonight, Martin Brown amazed everyone by his fantastic presentation on MySql, ZFS and DTrace at Sun's customer briefing centre in London.

I Loved it..Geeks were speechless!!..and guess what?..the whole presentation was run on MAC rather than Solaris to prove full compatibility.

Microsoft Windows 7 (BETA)

Well, even though I'm not a big fan of Microsoft products since Windows XP SP3, I kind of felt tempted to give a try to Windows 7 beta after reading a number of highly positive reviews from the trusted experts.

After completing the registration process I was given a license number which apparently is valid till August 09. It's a relatively large image file (2.5 GB) which needs to be recorded onto a DVD.





But surely there is no operating system safer, smoother, faster and more reliable than OpenSolaris by Sun Microsystems. Not because I work for Sun, Nope, because it really is reliable and nothing makes me feel better more than assurance.

Haven't you noticed the paradox??

Windows Vista in the background, Visual Studio on the desktop and still nagging about Microsoft!!!

The Day After Tomorrow?

You probably remember the movie 'The Day After Tomorrow' and the fact that how climate change can lead to a disaster. Apart from the huge exaggerations which made the movie quite exciting, it was still based on some proven scientific facts. A shaft in the major ice shelves within either of the polar regions or melting the ice shelves, will result in a total climate change all over the world which all stem from a minor increase in atmosphere temperature or what we call "Global Warming".

Interestingly new studies have shown that is actually beginning to happen. Here is the link to the BBC news.

To make it short, these are the highlights which would interest you.

1. Scientists say data from satellites and weather stations indicate a warming of about 0.6C over the last 50 years.
2. The continent of Antarctica is warming up in step with the rest of the world, according to a new analysis.
3. Meanwhile, scientists in Antarctica say a major ice shelf is about to break away from the continent.
4. The Wilkins Ice Shelf is said to be "hanging by a thread" from the Antarctic Peninsula, the strip of land pointing from the white continent towards the southern tip of South America.
5. A BAS team currently on site is reporting that the Wilkins shelf, about 15,000 sq km in area, is probably about to break free.
6. "It really could go at any minute, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the final cracks started to appear very soon," said BAS's David Vaughan.
7. Last year, scientists from the UK Met Office used climate models to attribute trends at the poles, and concluded that human emissions of greenhouse gases were largely responsible for the observed warming.
8. A much bigger question is whether the new analysis of Antarctic warming heralds any major melting in the West Antarctic ice sheet, which could lead to big changes in sea level and global impacts.

Source :BBC News