Things that get alive (as I connect them)

Some additional and removable hardware I have connected to my box (a Sun Blade 1k)
USB

• Hub: noname 4 port (vendor id:03eb, product id: 3301)
• Mouse: Logitech Optical
• Card-reader: SMSC USB97C223, labelled "Hama 6xUSB" working with all card types
• Memory-stick: any class 1 flash mem will do
• Camera: Nikon FinePics 4200 in mass storage mode
• IDE-USB: portable HDD (actually "on the road", feel free to ask me for the type)
• Soundcard: Terratec Aureon 5.1 USB (I submitted this one into the official Solaris HCL)
• Lamp [SCNR]

FireWire

• Philips DVD-burner in 'Digitus' IDE to IEEE1394 case

SCSI

• DDS2-Tape: HP JetStore 6000 AKA C1533
• Scanner: HP ScanJet 4c/t

Solaris DVD-burning Solaris+FireWire
Hardware

jEdit

As full-faetured as EMACS (yes, Lisp too - even Prolog!), but with X and rather canonical keystrokes, made in Java, running quite everywhere. I use it for everything.
Except as a kitchen sink, of course.

gocr, XSane and OCRAD

I could score an aged HP-ScanJet 4c/t SCSI-Scanner at eBay for almost no money. It was recognized by Blastwave's XSane after I composed the following /kernel/drv/sgen.conf

device-type-config-list="scanner", "processor";
inquiry-config-list= "HP",  "C2500A",
 "HP",  "C2500A 3332";
name="sgen" class="scsi" target=2 lun=0;
sgen-diag=1;

and symlinked /dev/scanner against /dev/scsi/processor. (I know this is evil Linux-style - but Xsane wanted to have it ;) ). Now I had my scanner working - and it works really fine. Way better than the cheap USB-scanner at my girlfriend's PeeCee, but still I had no OCR. Blastwave had no package, nor has SUN's companion software service , nor Sunfreeware.com.

On Sourceforge, I found GOCR, which compiled flawlessly with gcc and automake 2.59 from Blastwave. I had a look then at GNU GNU is UNIX, sometimes, at least after gcc has been over the sources. I had some minor difficulties, compiling OCRAD, the latest version will not compile under Solaris/gcc-3.4.3 -

main.cc:194: error: `snprintf' is not a member of `std'

I am not familiar enough with C++ to find out how to fix this - looks like a classpath issue to me. But I managed to compile OCRAD v0.10. I'll try to find out what the fsck is with 0.12 and try to build it. Meanwhile you will find binaries of gocr and gocr.tcl built with gcc 3.4.3 on a SUN Blade1000 (UltraSparc III) under Solaris10 here, and OCRAD there.

P.S.: Seems like OCRAD beyond 0.10 won't compile under Solaris because the author used a non-standard C++ function, which is wrapped by Linux' glibc but not by Sun's. I used gcc and the standard GNU libs -I intended to build an OpenSolaris package- but no luck. The discussion on bugs_ocrad at gnu.org do not look as if this going to resolve by any chance. :(
There goes interoperability. That really pisses me off in some way - I mean this incompatibilty would have been easy to avoid, but it doesn't happen IMHO because of personal vanity.

Solaris+OCR GNU

DAV-Explorer

Another one in Java. Works fine, once you get used to it. I use it primarily for my other blog. You can find the Biaries, Sources and Docs here.
Solaris WebDAV

GNUChess/Xboard

I don't know why the precompiled GNUChess played like a digital idiot and why it did not seem to contain a book.
I got the sources for xboard and chess from ftp.gnu.org and made my own binaries. Worked painlessly. Beats me any time.

Solaris+Chess
GNU

Opera

I have been using Opera for quite some time now, on several platforms. I Loved the 5.x Versions, when Opera really was ahead. Don't forget who brought us Tabbed Browsing :)
Version 7 rather shocked me, at least under Linux it was the ugliest Browser, I had ever seen.
-Yes, I have seen Amaya! [*SCNR*] I've even used MOSAIC - there was nothing else.
I am just about to get used to the current release, there still seem to be some CSS flaws, but what does that mean? I'll have to find out, why eBay is kicking me, when I try to log in with Opera. Strange.
My favourite through many years has always been Mozilla, but it looks like it getting slaughered by these Firefox Zealots.
Opera's email client is not so featureful as Mozilla's - but it's ok for sending some linking while browsing the net. I've got Sylpheed as my main MUA. Not perfect, but I have not seen the perfect mail app yet.

So. let's see, if Blogger will swallow this, or if i'll get kicked once more with my fancy red browser...

NetBeans 4.1

OK. Turn on the lights, we had a fine eclipse in 2000, but it's over now.
NetBeans is better, faster, much more actual, won't insist on telling you what you have to do next, will DWIM.

Flames on!

Solaris
Java

Blender 2.3.6

Blender, as we all know, rocks. The free 3D modeller/raytracer was originally written under IRIX, as this historic software announcement from Linux-Gazette says. (You'll have to scroll down a little).
I needed to write a quick and dirty litte wrapper for blender to find the right libraries:

LD_PRELOAD=/opt/csw/lib/libintl.so.2:/opt/csw/lib/libiconv.so.2: /opt/csw/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0:/opt/csw/lib/libstdc++.so.6:/opt/csw/lib/libgcc_s.so.1
export LD_PRELOAD
./blender
unset LD_PRELOAD

Your mileage may differ, depending on the path where you have additional libs from the companion CDs, sunfreeware, or blastwave.org. Thanks to the fact that blender's latest versions are available for many different platforms, I have built myself a little rendering farm, running IRIX, Solaris and Linux. Quite funny to have the modeller running on my antique Indigo2 and have the results of rendering runs served by a SPARC/x86 cluster in the background.

Net Beans

Why NetBeans - why not Eclipse? I've got Eclise, too. But, as I promised in this blog's topic, I want to focus on applications not in the major distributions and Eclipse has been packaged by Blastwave for quite some time.
I can't say, which JDE I prefer, Eclipse has got this nice PHP-Plugin, but my machine is a SUN Blade 1000, and Net Beans just belongs here. I am also quite used to work with Net Beans and its predecessor, so I guess, I'll keep using them both.

RSSOwl

Another Java one. I don't know if I even have to introduce it. RSSOwl is a news aggregator, was Freshmeat's project of the month, somewhen end of 2004. Will run almost everywehre, I guess. It's always on my desktop.

TkSETI

Well, I have been running this on GNU/Linux x86 since about 1998. I don't want to miss it. Who knows, what all the SETI stuff will ever be good for, but it's small, fast and easy.

Art Of Illusion

Java is too slow for 'real' applications?
I can't complain. Art of illusion is a 3D-modeller/raytracer written in Java. It's Open Source and i am actually doing a lot of animations with it.