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

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.

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 :)

Code for freedom

India gained freedom 60 years ago. To commemorate this event, Sun has launched the "Code for Freedom" contest. This is open to all graduate/undergraduate studets in India. The contest will run for 6 months (upto Feb 08).

The prizes include

• Sun Workstations/Laptops for the grand prize.
• iPods Shuffles for significant contributors.
• USB sticks for early bird prizes.
• T-shirts for each valid submission.
• Sun hardware for university with the most worthwhile contribution.
  

You can choose to do your project in any of the following technologies depending on your interest:

Technology	Type of project	Interests
OpenSolaris	Work on solving bugs here. Solve as many as possible. Try to take on an easy one first and then try to move up the complexity.	C/C++, Operating system, Unix
Project GlassFish	Improve Project GlassFish by submitting bug reports, bug fixes, enhancement requests, code, documents and localizations. Click on the left link for more details	Java, Servlets, Client-Server model.
NetBeans	Code, Bugs and Documentation for the Netbeans IDE. This is one place where non-technical users can contribute in the form of tutorials, help pages, etc.	IDEs, Java, Netbeans.
Apache Derby	Putback code into the Apache derby codebase. Derby is a complete relational-database implementation with a very small footprint written fully in Java.	Java, Database
Open Portal	Portlets, Bugs, RFEs, Documentation. Work on the technologies (listed in link). Help with the integration with Netbeans.	Java, website, remote accesss

A suggestion to fellow students. Select your project depending upon your interest. It wont matter if you haven't contributed in the field/project before. This contest is meant to be that bridge. Once you have a topic selected, join all the appropriate mailing lists and IRC channels. Download the relevant source code and look through it. Once you have an idea of the flow of code, you can start with the actual coding. Be sure to learn how to ask questions on a mailing-list. The folks who work on your selected project will be more than happy to help you.

Go here for complete contest guidelines. You can take a look at the rules and FAQ.

Drop any queries you have below.

Welcome to free software. Happy coding!

Bosug Hackathon

The even went as planned and we had a great time. We came up with 35 spec files :)

The details are here. The pizza was good, the interaction was great. Wiht a large percentage of the participants being students (including myself), we learned a lot at his event. A 'thank you' goes to Shivakumar for organizing the event. Looking forward to more such.

I wrote the spec files for gnomad2 and its library dependencies.. and now you can easily connect and manage your creative music players on solaris :)

PS : I know Madhu took pictures, so if someone knows where they're uploaded, could you post the links here?

First ever opensolaris Hackathon (..that I know of)

 
A bunch of us at BOSUG, and few others around the world, will be participating in the first ever hackathon in OpenSolaris land. Its a 10-4 event on the upcoming Saturday.

Topic for Hackathon: Writing SFE spec files for open source software and contributing back to pkgbuild/specfiles repository. Most of these will be software already into BeleniX (..the BOSUG sweetheart!).

This event is being organized by BOSUGians Shivakumar and Ananth. Collect very good tutorials on pkgbuild and the GNU toolchain.

Around 20 members are participating in the event, with the ambitious target of 15 spec files per head. That should be close to 300 new spec files if we reach the expected results! The current repository is around 400 files big.

The discussions for the hackathon have been taking place at belenix-discuss. Join in to participate in this fun community.

Thats it for now. Will update later on how the event went.

Java Tutorials

I'd like to point out a great site for beginners getting into Java.

http://blogs.sun.com/thejavatutorials/

They contain great step by step instructions to create desktop applications using the Netbeans IDE. You might want to read the posts from the bottom, to stay in context. the page looks like it is currently active, so new tutorials are being added, so time to add that link to your bookmark (or RSS reader).

Another tutorial at http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/learn/index.html

Corona

Whew!

Campus ambassadors from Bangalore (& our friend Nitin from NIT, Suratkal) conducted a hands on event 'Corona' today.

We had limited seating, so registered 80 participants from various colleges/universities.

Corona started off with an introductory talk on the OpenSolaris community (I used the slides by Tim Foster). This was followed by a talk on Sun Studio 12 and it great features.

CA head for India, Ganesh, attended the first talk, and we has pictures taken. I'd like to mention now that he was the one who encouraged us CAs to come up with Corona. Thanks Ganesh!

Finally, Corona concluded with a hands on session on Java ME with Netbeans. You could hear all the "Wow"s and the *sigh*s when Anand dragged forms over the Java ME forms!

In between, we conducted a programming contest on C, and another one on Java ME. We gave our 4 USB sticks to the winners. All of the 70 who attended walked away with the SXDE DVDs (see pic below!), Netbeans CDs and the SUN pens.

The enthusiastic crowd at corona!..

 

.. And the ambassadors actively promoting temple of the sun ;) 

(Nitin, Pradeep, Anand, Jayanth, Yours truly, Trisha, Pooja and Ankita) 

Java EE Tech Demo

Continuing the Java theme, I conducted a Java EE tech demo yesterday. For all interested the slides and sheets are available for download.

Netbeans EE Presentation

Netbeans Web Application sheet

Netbeans Web Services sheet

Netbeans EJB

To the guys who attended: There's surprises coming up in the next demo, including a chance to win 5000$ ! Stay tuned for those ;)

Continuum 07

Continuum 07, the tech fest of JSSATE was held on Mar 29,30. SUN sponsored the On Spot Programming event.

We first had a talk by technical staff from SUN: Pradhap, Narendra and Sridhar.

The prelim round of OSP saw around 75 teams participating..

 Finally three teams won! (Heres a pic of the finalists. One team not in pic)

Around 1200 participants took part in the 2 day event! Information at http://www.continuum-fest.org

First Campus Seminar

I presented he introductory seminar in college today. An audience of 100-120 turned up, including many faculty members.

 I outlined the various benefits that students have from the SAI program. Many students, especially the 2nd year students showed interest in learning Java and implementing a project. (Of course the grand prize of an Ipod helped, too)

 Here's a picture of the event:

Many had questions as to how they go about the activities, I've answered the queries below.