Calvin Austin

There were several announcements this week about the Consumer JRE, essentially a developer release as a preview for a lighter, faster Java for non-developers to use in their browser.

However it couldn't be further from a consumer release if you tried. First the normal small windows installer was missing when it was announced. Next the modular downloader known as the Java kernel was not ready for the release anyway and there is still some discussion about it even being in the update. As for me the installer failed to update my 32bit windows machine - which we later found out was due to previous JREs not being overwritten and here still isn't a 64bit plugin for windows nearly 3 years after the 64bit port was done.

But the good news is that this was a developer release. It could have been so much better but hopefully the teams will go back and make the real consumer release better. Not just smaller and faster but reliable and high quality too.

Not since the proposed Java 2000 have I had a good whole hearted laugh at Java.

So what is next, APPL to change to IPOD, or MSFT to OFFICE, ORCL to DB. Does JAVA have to be quoted as JAVA(TM) on the ticker to keep trademark status? What happens if the coffee commodity industry hits a bad patch, would JAVA be affected?

Thanks SUNW for some news that made me smile! I'll still be using Java for years to come.

We used to have some Spikesource company blogs donated by blog city a while ago but my one was deleted somehow so its great to start using Movabletype which is part of the SuiteTwo stack.

So much has happened since my previous Spike blog, I'm using vmware a lot more, Ubuntu Feisty and I think firefox must have updated itself more times than I can count. But the thing that comes to first to mind is the gotcha with LVM

LVM logical volume manager on paper is great, I've almost not noticed it when I've installed linux. So much so that I accept its default settings and names. This worked great for me until I needed to access one LVM enabled disk on a similar machine.

The problem is that the default volume group VolGroup00 LogVol00 of the running system clashes with the default volume group of the disk you want to access. For me LogVol00 is root (/) on both. The crux is that you have to rename one of the volume groups.

Although on paper it looked like I could do this as follow. Edit the /etc/lvm/lvm.conf file tell it to exclude the disk I booted with, run the lvm command and use the subcommand vgrename. The vgrename failed because I needed to deactivate each volume (ie partition). The command to deactive the partition, vgchange then failed because it saw I already had LogVol00 already mounted as /! The first time I did this I forgot to change lvm.conf back which was a bad idea

The solution is to reboot with a rescue or install CD, re-run lvm, and then vgrename. Then reboot, do what I needed to do. Reboot again to change the volume back so I could stick it back into the original machine. so near yet so far