Sub-Optimal?

Then they dropped all the sun-like left-side function keys. This provoked uproar among the potential buyers (who are, of course, all alpha geeks with religious positions on keyboard details), so it seems they may have changed their
mind.

I’ve also seen no mention of support for anything other than windows or mac for the devices that they have released.

There are some positives:

Optimus 103 keyboard will be a mass storage device. That means, that Optimus
will be the first (to the best of our knowledge) keyboard to appear on a
desktop just like a hard disk or a flash drive. Among the benefits of this
solution is that we won’t have to create any drivers (except for the
OS-dependent Configurator software). Layouts could be put right into the
keyboard’s storage.

Which is kinda cool.

Will it be worth the ~USD400 price tag? We’ll have to wait and see what other compromises have been made.

Making packages

Following Eric Boutilier's latest two posts on packaging and a conversation on #opensolaris, I was interested enough to try pkgbuild for myself. Of course, I'd forgotten about his earlier series of posts on the topic, so I'd forgotten the connection to JDS.

As a result, I started making packages without the JDS CBE (Common build environment). But it's worked pretty well. For example, on a standard Solaris 10 installation (03/05 for me, but anything should work):

• PATH=$PATH:/usr/sfw/bin:/usr/ccs/bin export PATH
  
• Download the pkgbuild tool from http://pkgbuild.sourceforge.net/.
• Unpack and install with a standard command ./configure && make && make install
• Grab this spec file for ruby-1.8.5 that I knocked up with the help of Eric's posts and Redhat's docs.
• As a non-root user run pkgtool --download --define="_prefix /opt/mypkgs" build-only ruby.spec
• Wait :)

It should create a ~/packages directory, download the source file with wget, compile it, build a package and put it in ~/packages/PKGS.