A quick test run of Chromium OS

The slick folks over at gdgt got the source code of the upcoming Google Operating System (currently called Chromium) and built it into a VMWare Image. Being a serious nerd I needed to check it out (most likely due to the rampant news in the past months).

I downloaded the image and installed VMWare Player, from that point I was helped by a post on the gdgt Chrome OS discussion thread since the image would not boot out of the gate. They directed me to a vmx VMWare Player script that would load the hard drive image correctly. From that point I modified the Guest OS type to "Linux / Debian 5.0" from "Other" to get network connectivity.

I was than able to log in with my Google credentials. As expected I was loaded directly into Chrome (the browser) and an attempt was made to connect to Gmail. However there was some DNS issues preventing host lookups, therefore only allowing access to websites via direct IP.

From my quick browsing I was unable to find any network settings so I stopped there. Honestly I just wanted to see if it was what I expected and it was. Does an OS entirely in the cloud impress me? Not really, but there is potential and hopefully Google carries on with this experiment to make something viable.

MariaDB is Michael "Monty" Widenius' branch of the popular MySQL database after it was purchased by Sun and taken in a different direction.

I was browsing my RSS Reader the other day and noticed that the latest beta of MariaDB was released as noted on the MySQL Performance Blog and thought as a database user and developer I would give it a try.

Since it was Sunday and I wanted a challenge I decided to install it from source. I downloaded the latest source tarball (5.1.38 Beta) to my Debian 5.0 server and uncompressed it. The build instructions were fairly standard:

1) Install the Prerequisites: apt-get build-dep mysql-server

2) In the source directory I ran: BUILD/autogen.sh

3) Than ./configure --prefix=/opt (I use /opt since I did not want it to interfere with my existing MySQL installation)

4) make

5) make install

From there I created a data directory for the MariaDB using mkdir /opt/data and the mysql_install_db tool (/opt/bin/mysql_install_db --datadir=/opt/data --user=mysql)

I stopped my running MySQL server and launched MariaDB:

/opt/libexec/mysqld --no-defaults --user=mysql --pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid --socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock --port=3306 --basedir=/opt --datadir=/opt/data --tmpdir=/tmp --language=/opt/share/mysql/english --skip-external-locking --skip-networking --key_buffer=16M --max_allowed_packet=16M --thread_stack=128K --thread_cache_size=8 --myisam-recover=BACKUP --query_cache_limit=1M --query_cache_size=16M --expire_logs_days=10 --max_binlog_size=100M --plugin_dir=/opt/lib/mysql/plugin --plugin-load=ha_innodb.so:ha_archive.so &

This defines all the appropriate paths so MariaDB does not bump into MySQL, as well as load the InnoDB and Archive plugins.

As per the warnings when I started MariaDB for the first time I upgraded the database using: /opt/bin/mysql_upgrade -u root -p

To test the install I used the MariaDB command line client and the with the default root account: /opt/bin/mysql -u root -p.

MariaDB supports the complete MySQL feature set plus some tweaks including the XtraDB, processlist and extended slow log patch set from Percona.

MariaDB has the potential to surpass MySQL since it's development and expansion is driven by community need rather than corporate desire. It touts itself as being more optimized and speedier than the MySQL default MyISAM via the Maria Storage Engine. I do hope it will lives up to it's claims as I will be following it every step of the way.