Solaris 11, xemacs and dbx

I have recently installed Solaris Express (Solaris 11), first in one virtual machine and then on "bare metal". I have to say that I'm very pleasantly surprised. The installation went very smooth, the only "configuration" neccessary was to enter time, location, select additional locales, type in the root password and to create a new non-root user upon first login. The default desktop is GNOME and looks very polished up. Security-wise, the installation seems very sane. There are many services bound on TCP ports, but almost all of them only to the loopback interface (meaning that only local programs can connect to them). The only publicly open ports are 111 (rpcbind) and 22 (ssh), 6011 and 6010 (I guess, X). And sshd is configured to not permit root logins by default.

I tried Sun Studio 11, but.. being used to emacs, it doesn't feel quite right (+ it's not comfortable to use it if you're running it over remote X11 connection). However, Solaris has a very nice toolbox for programmers: dbx, mdb, dtrace and tnf (man tracing), different malloc libraries, etc. It's really very advanced OS, and very developer-friendly. Plus there are zones, fine-grained privilege and role system which works... And everything is excellently documented in man pages. I'm too short on time right now to describe all the goodies, but.. I'm impressed. By the installation, default settings, and overall consistency and look&feel of the system. I can only say excellent work to all the Solaris developers, and a big thanks to Sun for making it all available at no charge.

Now, to the topic: I had a problem with xemacs not displaying source files when I used it with dbx to debug a multi-directory project. The problem turned out to be that dbx does not by default display full path to the source file. xemacs looks for the file in the wrong directory and consequently does not show the source you're supposed to be debugging. You can solve this problem by putting the following line in your .dbxrc:

DBX_output_short_file_name=off