Opensolaris 2008.05

Opensolairs 2008.05 was released at CommunityOne. This marks a milestone in the Opensolairs history.

The Opensolaris community got together at the developers summit and discussed the way forward.

More pictures from the events here and here. 

Its heartening to read the positive reviews around the web (a rather flattering on here). Its been months of hardwork to get here. But as dminer puts it, it more a beginning than an end.

Want to try out the great new technologies like ZFS, Dtrace, Zones, SMF, an easy to use desktop with 3D goodness, all in an easy to digest 1CD format? Go get Opensolaris 2008.05

Session persistance on Indiana RC2

I've releases the alpha-works-for-me version of the session persistance scripts for Indiana RC2 (to be OpenSolaris 2008.05). the tar file can be downloaded from here. You can keep track of this bug for further enhancements.

Howto create LiveUSB: Untar the file when running from the LiveCD, and run ./usbdump. Verbose output is set to on, so a lot of text would scroll by. Just follow the instructions on screen. Minimum 1 Gb pen drive required.

No time to type more.. leaving for the Opensolaris Summit and Javaone. I intend to update this blog regularly with pictures from the conferences, so keep a lookout. If you're attending the summit, do say hi :)

Belenix 0.7 out

Been a long time since the last post. And the big news is? Belenix 0.7 is out!

With loads of goodness :)

* Caiman installer

* ZFS root once installed

* Source code at sourceforge

* KDE 3.5.8

And lots more. Read the release notes.

Join in at #belenix on freenode, or the mailing lists (user, developer).

File your bugs here.

And get your copy via http or torrent.

Milax, a new OS distribution

Alexander Eremin has just released a new distribution called Milax. It is the Damn Small Linux of Opensolaris. Its a ~70 Mb download. This is great because opensolaris generally had a big footprint.

Go on to http://www.sunhelp.ru/ for more information. The site is in russian, so you might want to go there via Google translate.

Go check it out.

Building your Sun Spot controlled Car

BITS Pilani, Goa, one of India's top engineering institutes, organized a 3 day Technical fest Quark 08.

A couple of friends(IRR, SVK) and myself participated in the All Terrain Transporter Robotics event.

We built a Sun Spot controlled car. One Spot was mounted on the car and controlled the various motors. We soldered 20 head pins to the lower side of the EdemoBoard and used a 20 pin cable to attach various pins to the electronic components. Another Spot was hand-held and controlled the Car.

Read on for details to build one yourself.

Of Webrevs and Sun Spots

So I've been working away at a couple of projects.. and heres a little about them.

How to use webrev with mercurial

I've been trying to get my changes into the slim_prototype repository and ran into issues getting webrev to run with mercurial. A few posts on mailing lists later I found the solution: uninstall the present mercurial and webrev packages and get the new ones. Follow the links at http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=50182&tstart=0

Sun Spot car

This is the second project I've been working on. BIT Pilani Goa has a tech fest called BITS Quark and I'm participating in the All Terrain Transporter.

What better way to build it than using the super awesome Sun Spots! This project is half complete.. expect pictures very soon. Stay tuned.

Where is the Magic?

Akhilesh just posted this to the opensolaris mailing list:

Where is the Magic?

Hi everybody,

As an opening remark, let me say that I have been dealing with systems for sometime and have been monitoring OpenSolaris since its inception.

Although there are many nice things, I have been both puzzled and "awed" by one particular thing I have observed - the problem resolution process.

I have observed again and again[1], that whenever somebody posts a "problem", it is invariably replied with one or more of the following-

1. Bug number, explanation and possible course of action
2. Not a bug, link to document/explanation and correct way to accomplish what the user wants.
3. Explanation of ways to further nail down the root cause of bug (crash dump/kmdb etc), leading to either a bug filing or a straight one line bug number!!

Now, OpenSolaris/Solaris/SunOS is a consolidation of pretty big chunks of code. There are numerous interactions within and outside the system. This is aside from the fact that Solaris is pretty old and still evolving by the day! There are bound to be rough edges and cruft lying around.

I am mystified as how it is possible that so *many* people are working on this, and almost everybody has a firm grasp of the whole system!!! It is as if the *complete* system is a glassbox and everybody can see it through and through and identify where and how the system is acting up.

Now if it were just the work of one person, I could understand, but it is as if the whole work is hand-sculpted by whole team and even then everybody knows the whole picture! I have never seen anything like this, and frankly find it hard to believe.

So, thanks folks, you rock! But - goddamit - how do you do it ???

Is is a bug database with magical search capabilities ? Is it some piece of magical "process" ? Or is it that Sun somehow found the receipe to problem of scaling the competence ?

The BeleniX 5 Day challenge

The Belenix team has just announced a 5 day challenge. It consists of small short term challenges that will win you prizes. The contests range from artwork to themeing to web development to application porting.

Come, participate! 

 

The contest is running parallely with  the FOSS.in conference from Dec 4-8th.

Blazing fast solaris install

So, you've installed OSes before. But did it install before you were through with your coffee?

Indiana preview is reported to install in 7 minutes from a USB. How's that for speed :)

/Me thinks this is a world record for a full fledged distro.

Indiana Developer Preview is here

Great news.. The Indiana Developer preview was released a few minutes ago.

All sorts of details here

Go on, get downloading, and spreading to the fullest extent. 

:)

[Update : Dennis Clarke has put up an excellent series of screenshots and instructions.]
 

Faster booting media coming to a store near you

Moinak has written an entry on the very cool file sorting technology that has gone into the Distro Constructor(DC) project.

What this means to Joe user is that he needs to follow simple steps and build a Live distro that will have bootup time that was until recently in the realm of BeleniX and Knoppix.

Belenix optimizes the way files are arranged on the LiveCD, so the OS requests for files during bootup do not require the CDROM pin moving around crazily (as is normally the case). It uses Dtrace to note down the order of file requests. The distribution constructor project has incorporated these features into it. So heres what you do:

* Build your own (slow) distro using DC. Burn this on a CD and boot from it. Bootup can take anywhere b/w 5 to 10 minutes normally.
* Select "Solaris (32 bit) I/O tracing" from Grub. This will start off the background wizardry to note down the order of access of files. This data is saved in the file 'traceout' on your hard disk.
* Reboot from hard disk. Run 'proc_tracedata' script on this file. It generates a iso.sort file, which is a listing of all the files in the order they were accessed.
* Now rerun the DC to remake your distro. It will use the iso.sort file when rebuilding your LiveCD image.
* Now boot up your distro at blazing speeds!

This is the first time a LiveCD generator has automated such optimizations (not to speak of the hsfs speedups) into it. I predict this will start off a slew of distributions based on OS in the coming year.

Do you want to learn more about the Distro Constructor project and attend a workshop where you can learn to create your own distro? Attend my talk at Foss.in in the first week of December 07!

Foss.in is the biggest FOSS conference in India, with speakers coming in from around the world. If you are a technology enthusiast, and can make it to Bangalore, you shouldn't miss it. See you there :)

The Opensolaris Summit

Ok.. So I've caught up on the email, uploaded the pics, and am ready to blog about the summit.

But I find that folks have already done most of it, so I'll just link to them:

Alvaro's famous line of mugshots

Recordings of all the sessions 

Jim's collection of links 

Flickr pool of Images 

The summit was a great way to see the faces behind the email IDs in the mailing lists. I met everyone from Ian murdock to Glynn foster to Dave miner to Joerg Schilling to Sara ..

The summit cleared reservations of many regarding the degree of Sun's hold on the community distro "OpenSolaris". I learnt more about the distro constructor project (a talk that I've submitted to foss.in, be there). I also got a cool USB with the first milestone of Indiana preview that is scheduled to be released in the last week of this month.

I couldn't stay long in California, but enough to goto the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, and The technological museum of Innovation, which was also showing the Body Worlds Exhibition. If you get a chance to visit there, don't miss the latter, you'll walk out with an amazing understanding of the human body!

The new ambassadors

We have just concluded the orientation sessions for (half) the new set of ambassadors from India. What a bunch of amazing (and geeky) folks!

It's been three days of great fun, interesting talks and varied discussions.

Wont talk much, and as pictures say a thousand words, here are three thousand:

Below are the guys attending the orientation: (well, all except my co CA tech-lead..)

(..Vineet, who morphed into agent smith..)

(But that does not deter us from saving him..)

Thats it for now. A very warm welcome to all new members of the Sun CA family. Wishing you the very best of luck and a great year ahead :)

BeleniX's popularity surge

Belenix was featured on isohunt.com, a torrent distribution site. This took it's popularity way ahead. Currently the DVD version (0.5.1) has over 10000 seeds. when was the last time you saw that many? Not even the latest blockbusters :)

http://www.isohunt.com/

http://www.isohunt.com/torrents/belenix

Session persistance on BeleniX LiveUSB

I've been working on BeleniX session persistence for some time, and have completed the overall initial framework.

The usbdump script to create the LiveUSB can be downloaded here.

Click read more for a semi-detailed explanation.