Meet Mr. DTrace - Part 1

DTrace has aroused a big buzz in the community. This neat tool provides a powerful infrastructure for dynamic tracing. DTrace ships some built-in probes, such as vminfo, sysinfo, proc, io etc; furthermore, the DTrace facilitates the developers to plugin customized static probes as well. DTrace meets Javascript (screenshot), is the initial effort to embrace DTrace in Javascript community.

Install OpenSolaris

There are a bunch of OpenSolaris distribution projects actively developed. I chose NexentaOS since it is characterized as the synergy of the OpenSolaris and GNU softwares. The installation is quite smooth since I am using the VMWare image, just copy, launch, and you get a Ubuntu-like desktop. The network adapter works out of the box.

Install GCC

It is quite annoying that Ubuntu-derived distribution does not include GCC as the base. But you can install it anyway.

sudo apt-get install gcc build-essential

Build the Mozilla Firefox

Download the source code for Mozilla Firefox you are using, in my case, i.e Firefox-1.5.0.7. I manually adapt the modification from Helper Monkey, augment the Makefile.in to add the new files, (patch). After 2 hours struggling, and I googled the web and found Ticket #405. Oops!

Ok, let me try to install Sun Studio 11 on Nexenta. No luck at all, the installer hides the detailed error message, what I could find is the Java I/O exceptions. If I were more experienced OpenSolaris user, I might find a way to solve this problem.

That is the day one, I would rather try the official OpenSolaris Express Developer Edition tomorrow.