Friday March 25, 2005 1st OpenSolaris User Group on April 26th, 2005
The 1st ever OpenSolaris User Group will meet on April 26th, 2005 at the Sun Santa Clara campus. This is not the permenant name to be used, and will most likely change, but I am using it for the time being. This meeting is open to all interested parties, internal and external to Sun. We will be using this event as a kick-off event for OpenSolaris user groups to start up around the globe, and Sun will be assisting folks in doing so. I don't know that OpenSolaris fits the user group best, but I want this to be a collaboration between Sun and the community, which OpenSolaris is. I expect that much discussion will take place around Solaris in general, but OpenSolaris depicts the overall theme for a user group I've been seeking to form.
I have taken on the task of forming the first user group in Silicon Valley, and will leverage the help of the community, as well as the resources from Solaris Engineering to provide speakers and swag for those who attend.
Our first meeting will be held on the 2nd floor of the Santa Clara Auditorium. Stay tuned for more information as I have more to share.
I am pleased to announce our 1st guest speaker for the event,Liane Praza, who will discuss the Service Management Frameworks. Liane is intimately familiar with the Service Management Frameworks and I am confident that she will make the 1st user group meeting worth your while to attend. And you never know, there could be prizes and gifts to those that attend as well.[wink]
There might also be a few other Solaris Engineers on hand to talk tech with those of you who do show up. As some of you know, we tend to travel in packs...Keep posted for more information as I gather it.
( Mar 25 2005, 12:06:30 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [7]
Thursday March 24, 2005 Firefox, Thunderbird, and Mozilla build scripts
As many of you might know, me and John Weeks (one of my colleagues), have provided builds of mozilla products to mozilla.org for about the past year. We have recentely decided to hand this effort over to the Mozilla team inside Sun to continue.
As such, we have decided that it would be in the communities best interest to provide you with our build scripts that we've used to make the packages that we have been providing. This will provide the community with the ability to build their own builds of Firefox, Thunderbird, and Mozilla.
There is unfortunately a problem that exists with the latest Mozilla 1.8.x tree where mkdepends (a part of the X code) seems to have a recursive problem on Solaris. This is currently being looked at, but I didn't want this to stop us from releasing the scripts that we use for the community. Feel free to hack on them and improve them as you see fit.
Most of the credit for these builds scripts go to John Weeks, and John has been instrumental in helping me with various tasks inside Sun to help promote Solaris on both x86/x64 and SPARC. More than a year ago we started building OpenOffice, to show the StarOffice team that builds were needed for Solaris on x86/x64. They soon saw their error and started to build both OpenOffice and brought back the StarOffice product for Solaris on x86/x64. We then moved on to mozilla products and proceeded to do the same thing. Due to resource issues, this effort took us a little longer than expected, but finally the Mozilla team saw their error and is now building mozilla products for both Solaris on x86/x64 and SPARC.
Solaris on x86/x64 is now being thought of in parity with SPARC within Sun. Solaris is Solaris is Solaris is the mantra that many chant, it is all one and the same after all.
For you cynical folks that still don't believe that Sun is behind Solaris on x86/x64, all I can say is, "CERTAINLY YOU JEST!". Please stay tuned and we'll make believers out of all of you.
You can get the mozilla scripts at this link. I'll update the tarball when we fix the mkdepends issue with the latest Mozilla. In the meantime, please have at these scripts and build the sources for yourself.
These scripts do everything for you, from pulling down the CVS sources to building the packages, and even adding the README files. We'll be tidying these up, and I'll post when I update the tarball.
( Mar 24 2005, 02:13:31 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [4]
Making Solaris simpler to use, count on it!
Sometimes I'm amazed at how much technology is incorporated into Solaris, and at the same time it's missing the polish needed to make the system simple to use. I think this is mostly true for any form of UNIX (and that includes Linux, since Linux is merely a clone of UNIX anyway).
Apple has really set the standard for putting a nice GUI on top of Mac OSX, but even so, there's more to making a system usable besides nice GUIs. Some of the operations the computer performs can be simplified and automated much more than they are today, and Solaris can stand to gain some nice additions in this area.
Well, the good news is that Sun is taking this much more seriously and is going to be looking at this closely to figure out how Solaris can be more effecient, easier to operate, and just more usable in general.
You can only expect this area to get better on Solaris, because one things is certain about large companies like Sun. That is that when they set their mind to do something and put the effort into solving problems, things get done. The Solaris engineers continue to move forward, pounding out new frontiers, but the old frontiers should not be forgotten and rest assured that they are certainly not.
For the doubters out in the world, many of the Sun execs are now using Solaris on their laptops. Yes, they can operate and function in a professional environment by running Solaris on x86/x64. Every day more and more people inside Sun are converting over to use Solaris on x86/x64, and this revolution will continue until the majority of Sun is running Solaris on their x86/x64 systems. This is a great leap from where Solaris on x86/x64 was a couple years ago, and in a couple more years after Sun is able to really focus on the usability of Solaris, I think things are going to shape up and continue to make this one of the best systems available (not that it isn't so today, I think it is!;-).
Sun has almost a million registered licenses for Solaris 10 already, and this number continues to grow. In such a short time, there is incredible interest in Solaris.
( Mar 24 2005, 01:36:54 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [2]
Tuesday March 22, 2005 Managing patches gets easier on Solaris 10
Solaris 10 GA includes a program called smpatch which allows you to analyze your system(s) and update them to the patches which you prefer. This is very nice and allows you to install patches over the network on a local or network system. You not be on the local system to perform this.
This is work in progress and a GUI is coming to assist with this utility, but in the meantime it's possible to use this over the network and have your Solaris system updated.
# smpatch analyze 119016-01 SunOS 5.10_x86: Packaging Commands Patch 118997-01 SunOS 5.10_x86: patch usr/sbin/format 118960-01 SunOS 5.10_x86: patch usr/bin/acctcom and usr/bin/lastcomm # smpatch update Installing patches from /var/sadm/spool... 119016-01 has been applied. 118997-01 has been applied. 118960-01 has been applied. /var/sadm/spool/patchpro_dnld_2005.03.21@23:42:00:PST.txt has been moved to /var/sadm/spool/patchproSequester/patchpro_dnld_2005.03.21@23:42:00:PST.txt /var/sadm/spool/patchpro_dnld_2005.03.22@20:06:35:PST.txt has been moved to /var/sadm/spool/patchproSequester/patchpro_dnld_2005.03.22@20:06:35:PST.txt #
Check out the man page for more info and more commands, you can download, add, and analyze the patches on a given system, and can do it over the network as well to a remote system. I haven't seen many people talk about this well kept secret, but this is a feature that I'm sure many of you will enjoy having.
( Mar 22 2005, 07:56:41 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [7]