Keyboard - US Layout

It's true that in general the out-of-the-box keyboard layout configuration for a standard US keyboard shall work reasonably well by falling back to the standard despite Sun-specific key-stations that usually come together.

I decided to log this post as a complement to another one called Keyboard - Layouts where I demonstrated how to fully reconfigure the keyboard for console terminals without delving into very complex system APIs. In doing so I'll add the benefit of getting rid of spurious Sun-specific key-stations and enabling a few others that will be useful in achieving better text cursor control within console terminals.

I'll try not to repeat myself believing that any omissions on this post are fully explained on the previous one I've mentioned: Keyboard - Layouts.

Any standard hardware should do but I shall take a legacy PS/2 Dell keyboard model RT7D20 (US) as an example, which layout is a pretty standard one:
 

Solaris 11.4 Beta - GNU packages

It may be interesting and useful to know the out-of-the-box state of GNU packages for the upcoming Solaris 11.4 later this year. For Solaris 11.4 Beta we have:

Solaris 11.4 Beta - 1st impressions

Following the availability of Solaris 11.4 Beta I decided to give it a try.
I do not even intend a very first review, perhaps just some very preliminary impressions.

The installation hasn't changed that much, except there's no live GUI option anymore, which isn't an issue anyway. The removed option was indeed more suitable to promote the system in the past, but that's not needed anymore. On the other hand, it seems that duration of the internal operations of the install process have become longer, not that much, but enough to notice.

Once installed I do have noticed that (at least this beta version) take considerably (perhaps almost twice) more time to come up online (on an idle system). I hope that this is indeed related to a lot of development hooks and assertions still present on this beta release. The shutdown on the other hand seems to be OK taking around 30 seconds (on an idle system).

Interestingly, the packages repository still points to the current public release of Solaris 11.3 GA and I think that this may cause undesired issues if not promptly avoided by installing a local Solaris 11.4 Beta repository which is a very very long download and install.

The system certainly needs more than the bare minimum of 4GB of RAM and more CPUs according to the intended workloads. But in general (even idle) it also seems to be very I/O bound and with this I would mean it should use SSDs for mostly everything. Trying otherwise will probably required too much patience for the impatient.

Once this initial hurdles are overcome and the system settles down it seams OK.
But, of course, one has to go on experimenting to get more first impressions.
In particular, I started by check the progress on GNU packages.
     

Solaris 11.4 Beta - availability

Solaris 11.4 Beta was made available for (temporary) downloading!
I already downloaded the beta version to get very first impressions.

It continues raising the bar with many enhancements and new features.
This time it seems that focus is more related to security and simplification.

I expect advances towards a more modern userland experience.
What I mean is a more updated GNU subsystem, not any GUI stuff.
In fact, it seems Oracle is phasing out most of the GUI stuff.

Solaris is truly becoming more than ever the OS of choice for backing the Web.
The powerful and renewed capabilities of this solid OS fully supports this statement.
Not to mention the options of x86-64 to mid-range and high-end big iron SPARC systems.
  

Once more, since the beginning of this blog I can say:
If it must run, it runs on Solaris!