Saturday, November 1, 2008

Solipse on Parallels

Solipse has recently been updated for the latest stable version of Eclipse Ganymede (3.4.1).
One quick note on this update:
Recently, I acquired a Mac and installed Parallels with a trial license. Installation of SXCE b91 went smoothly, except a few of the default settings needed tweaking, i.e., the memory must be at least 768MB (I bumped mine to 1024 MB) or else there are Out of Memory errors, and the network adapter must be Bridged Ethernet to connect over WiFi.
Solaris Express on Mac Parallels

Opera is the first piece of software I always install. After that, I decided to try the eclipse solaris-gtk-x86 build since the latest version supported by the solipse script was out-of-date, because a user had reported a bug in our provisioning of the SDK Profile, because I wanted to see if Eclipse would be affected at all by the changes in JDK 6u10 and because I wanted to see how well Parallels would manage with such a memory intensive process.
Downloading and installing the pre-requisite software (SunStudio 11, which I have on a local share, JDKs 1.4, 5 and 6 and Apache Ant 1.7.1, which I prefer to the default 1.6.5 installation in SXCE) went as easily as possible.
My first attempt at a 3.4.1 build did not go quite as well as I had hoped. Eventually I ended up reverting to 3.4.0 because the provisioning bug was more pressing than the version upgrade. The build time decreased by half compared to my other SXCE installation (on a dual processor P3 at 1GHz per chip with 2 GB RAM). The time went from 75 minutes to 44.
After successfully fixing the p2 bug in the script and building and provisioning 3.4.0 with JDK 6u10, my final task was to figure out what had changed in the Eclipse build between 3.4.0 and 3.4.1. Eventually I found the culprit -- a modified classpath in the org.eclipse.osgi plug-in build.xml. Yet another find-and-replace went into the solipse script along with a few more parameters for versioning information, and soon the build was humming to a happy completion.
Solaris Express on Mac Parallels

My trial period for Parallels has not yet expired! The savings in build time alone will easily make the cost of a license worthwhile....

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