Thursday Aug 14, 2008
We've just pushed the repository update and ISO's for build 95, see the announcement. As with build 93, the ISO's are available via torrent, though I'd expect genunix and others to mirror shortly for those using non-P2P download technologies. Note that there's one issue with the ISO's mentioned in the release notes, which is that svc.configd complains about being unable to backup the SMF repository; that's bug 2824.
I'd also like to mention a discussion that I started late last week on about how to put the primary languages ISO on a diet, which I'd foreshadowed in my post about build 93. The ISO needs to lose about 70 MB by the time we release 2008.11. If you've got something to contribute to the discussion, feel free to join in, though I'd appreciate some reasoning or, even better, competitive analysis along with any suggestions you make.
Tuesday Jul 29, 2008
As David Comay announced a short time ago, the OpenSolaris repository has been updated to build 94. Unfortunately, as soon as we started releasing ISO's again, we were forced to stop, due to an unfortunate interaction between IPS and the live CD construction. See bug 2716 for the gory details. With any luck we'll resume releasing images with build 95. It looks like the fix will be a somehat significant change to the live CD layout, so those who are interested in that topic will want to follow along on the bug.
Friday Jul 25, 2008
One of the principal whines about the OpenSolaris distro from the existing Solaris community has been that it doesn't support SPARC. As we discussed in the roadmap presentation last month, it's planned for future releases, and one of our interns has recently published his work this summer on porting the distro to SPARC. Chris did a really great job on this, and while it's a ways from being done enough to release, his blog entries about the work are a good read. Check 'em out!
Thursday Jul 17, 2008
Peter has just announced the next meeting of the New England OpenSolaris User Group, which is on July 24. Sorry to say that I'll not be there, as I'll be on the plane back from California that evening, but hope we get a good turnout nonetheless.
Wednesday Jul 16, 2008
A belated note that, along with the pkg.opensolaris.org repository update to build 93, we've resumed releasing ISO's of the live CD. David's announcement has the details. Though we chose this time to make them available only via BitTorrent, our friends in the community have provided HTTP mirrors at www.genunix.org and Blastwave in the US and China. I see that our friends over at Phoronix wasted no time in providing a review. But guys, a bit of inside info: none of us calls this upcoming release "Jericho".
You'll note that the primary language ISO is actually too large for a CD; if you have to burn to CD media, then use the "all languages" image. Both ISO's have put on 50 MB of weight since the 2008.05 release, I'm in the middle of analyzing where that space went and putting together a diet proposal. Watch for that in the next week or two.
Monday Jun 09, 2008
Just noting that updated packages for snv_90 were pushed to the pkg.opensolaris.org repository over the weekend, see Alan's announcement for some very important instructions that need to be followed. Two things that I'll add:
- You should not use the Package Manager GUI to perform the update; instead use the pkg image-update command. The reason is that the GUI is not yet able to create an alternate boot environment for running the update, so you'll end up updating your running system and not have a clean fallback if something goes wrong. Yes, this will be fixed.
- We aren't yet publishing new ISO images, due to some fixes we need to make to the installer to synchronize with the ZFS boot project's integration. You wouldn't use those for updating from the 2008.05 bits anyway, so it's no real loss at the moment. We expect to resume publishing ISO's of every build via BitTorrent soon, possibly as soon as build 91.
Happy updating!
Friday Jun 06, 2008
This has been rescheduled for June 19...
We've scheduled a meeting for next Thursday, June 12 19, at 2 PM US/Pacific to have a planning and requirements discussion with the community around the OpenSolaris distribution. See Tim Cramer's announcement mail for more background and details; the working agenda is on the wiki. I'll be presenting our draft plans for the work covered in the Caiman project, and Stephen will do the same for IPS, the rest are still being worked out Hope to see you there!
Monday May 19, 2008
Thankfully, I was able to take a much-needed week off last week to recover from the OpenSolaris 2008.05 release. I'm still not sure which was more exhausting: the engineering work, or the parties afterwards. A few things that accumulated while I was gone:
- Barton published the impromptu podcast we did just before the big launch.
- Ars Technica published a nice review of OpenSolaris. My favorite, of course:
The most impressive aspect of OpenSolaris is the installation experience, which is painless, intuitive, and easily on par with Ubuntu and Fedora.
That's the nicest thing anyone's said about one of my projects in a long time.
- Unfortunately, we also got a less than outstanding result on another review. Looks like a known hang, possibly, but obviously we have work to do here.
And yes, the vacation was very nice, it included a couple of days at the
fabulous Bandon Dunes resort. Considering that I haven't been playing as much as I normally would have and links golf is about as different from the parkland layout I'm a member at as you can imagine, I was pretty happy with the 85 and 84 I shot on Pacific Dunes and Bandon Dunes, respectively. Much credit to my caddy, Jeff Pack, who did all the hard work of reading the putts and telling me what to hit. 2 days as a golf robot were kind of fun ;-) I've been to a lot of the top resorts in the
Golf Magazine rankings, and this is one of my favorites, as it's not at all pretentious; just "golf as it was meant to be". I will definitely be going back!
Monday May 05, 2008
As of a little while ago, the official bits for OpenSolaris 2008.05 went live, at the distro's home site, opensolaris.com.
While it may seem odd to say, I view this day more as a beginning than
an ending (though I am more than happy to call an end to the 60+ hour
weeks that went into building it!). It's a beginning in many ways, but
I'll just say that while we've shipped an image and loaded up a pretty
good number of packages into the repository, most of the functionality
we plan to ultimately have isn't there yet, not to mention the number
of packages we want to have in the repository.
At the moment I'm
too worn out from the weekend at the OpenSolaris Summit to even attempt
to write anything technical, as it likely wouldn't make any sense, so
I'll just keep this short and close with a big THANK YOU to everyone on
the Caiman team for all the work they've done in getting us to this
milestone. It's time to feel good about what we've done.
Look forward to seeing lots of you at CommunityOne!
Friday Apr 25, 2008
A test image for the 2008.05 release from Project Indiana is now available, see Stephen's announcement. We'd appreciate any feedback!
Wednesday Feb 13, 2008
The second preview of Indiana was pushed out for download about 15 hours ago as I write this. As those who are following closely know, we'd actually made a testing image available via Bittorrent a couple of weeks ago in order to broaden the testing exposure. This time the image actually got some professional and community testing, as opposed to Preview 1, which basically had about 1 hour of some of us trying to boot it on every machine we could get our hands on. Thanks to those who took the time to test it!
The announcement has the general highlights and links off to all of the bugs we've fixed. From an installation point of view, the changes in this preview are mostly under the hood. The most notable ones include:
- Most visibly, at least to those who encountered it, we fixed the bug that prevented you from using 'v' in the passwords of the root user and the user created during installation.
- A better PATH and MANPATH for the user account created at installation.
- The ZFS dataset hierarchy has been renamed and reorganized a little, it is now similar to what will be used in the ZFS boot/install project that'll be added to Nevada and Solaris 10. For the preview, you'll now see the root dataset named
rpool/ROOT/preview2. In the same vein, we now take a snapshot of all of the datasets at installation (snapshot name is @install) so that it's easy to tell what's been changed, and to get back to the start state of the system should that be needed for some reason. /boot/grub/menu.lst now points you off to the "real" menu, which is at /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst.- The introduction of
pkg verify pointed out some errors in the installation code, primarily around zero-length files, which we've fixed. A verification after installation will show some issues with modes of Python compiled files, but otherwise it'll be quite clean.
I've been running this on my laptop and desktop for a week now, and I've had no issues. If you're feeling adventurous, a couple of things I've done on my laptop.
First, I'm running with a compressed root. The installer doesn't support this right now, but you can easily fire up a terminal window and, once the installer's created the data sets, do a zfs set compression=on rpool/ROOT/preview2 and all of the installed software will be in compressed data sets. You need to do this quickly in order to get as much compressed as possible, since anything copied onto the data sets before the compression is enabled will not be compressed. After adding OpenOffice and a lot of other packages, I'm at 1.94 GB for the root dataset, with compression ratios reported at 1.8x or so.
The second thing is running Preview 2 as an xVM dom0. Three steps for this:
pkg install SUNWvirtinst SUNWurlgrabber SUNWlibvirt SUNWxvmhvm SUNWxvmdom SUNWxvm- Manually edit
/rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst and add the xVM entry. The normal method for doing this is bootadm -m upgrade, but it doesn't work for Indiana because of the menu being moved for ZFS root. The entry should look like title OpenSolaris xVM
kernel$ /boot/$ISADIR/xen.gz
module$ /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/unix
/platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive
- Run the following commands to update the sysevent registrations so that you can install domU's (fixing this is bug 509):
pfexec syseventadm add -c EC_xendev /usr/lib/xen/scripts/xpvd-event \
'action=$subclass' 'domain=$domain' 'vdev=$vdev' \
'device=$device' 'devclass=$devclass' 'febe=$fob'
pfexec syseventadm add -c EC_xpvsys /usr/lib/xen/scripts/xpvsys-event \
'subclass=$subclass' 'shutdown=$shutdown'
If you do give Indiana a spin, please report any bugs you find at
defect.opensolaris.org.
Friday Jan 11, 2008
In one of our meetings the other day I was pointing out to the team that I could tell most of them weren't using Indiana as their primary development platform, because I was finding bugs in the Caiman source release when attempting to build it using Indiana. Usually we're pretty good at eating our own dog food, but that hasn't really happened much yet with Indiana, in part because we've had a couple of other things to do at the same time. Some of the team suggested that one of the issues holding them back is that there's a bunch of additional stuff you need to add to the base Indiana install to make it suitable for development use, and they didn't feel they had the time to figure it out. Well, fortunately, I already have, at least for Caiman development, since I put Indiana on my laptop right after we released it 2.5 months ago, and my desktop a few weeks later (my desktop at home is still running SXCE for a bunch of mostly lame reasons). So, without further ado, here's my brief cheat-sheet on how to get an Indiana system into shape for OpenSolaris development:
- Follow the instructions for downloading the live CD, burning it, booting it, installing from it
- Once you've booted from the disk, make sure you update the system (which is mentioned in the above instructions, but bears repeating since it will fix some critical problems, such as the broken SVR4 packaging software on the preview media).
- Install the header files:
pkg install SUNWhea - Install Mercurial:
pkg install SUNWmercurial - Install make:
pkg install SUNWsprot - Install Java:
pkg install SUNWj6rt - Follow the instructions to download and install the compilers and build tools, though you'll want the tools from the SCM Migration project so that they work with Mercurial.
- In order to build the Caiman sources, download and pkgadd SUNWwbint, SUNWzoneint, and SUNWldskint (SUNWldskint isn't up there yet, we're working on getting that corrected).
- If you have an NVIDIA graphics controller, then you probably want to install NVDAgraphics and NVDAgraphicsr from the Nevada media or NVIDIA's web site.
- A few other things you might find yourself wanting; first two are on the Nevada media.
- SUNWflash-player-plugin
- SUNWrealplayer
- OpenOffice 2.3
I haven't tried building the OS/Net sources on Indiana since I haven't had a need lately, but I don't know of any reason why it wouldn't work.
Thursday Nov 15, 2007
I'm happy to report that we've just released more installation source code to OpenSolaris. What we've released today is the source code which corresponds to the Dwarf Caiman installer which appeared in SXDE 9/07, and the Slim Install installer that's used in the OpenSolaris Developer Preview. It also encompasses the SVR4 packaging code which had been released previously, but which is now being made available via the Mercurial repository rather than the tarball releases we'd been doing.
This is a significant milestone, as it represents essentially all of the source base that we're using in building the new installer in the Caiman project and finally opens us up for meaningful contributions from the community. Thanks to Moriah for her hard work on this, as well as the others on the team who helped with research and reviews!
Friday Nov 02, 2007
I've posted my slides from my talk about /demo of the preview release at last night's NEOSUG meeting, get 'em in PDF or ODP format. Thanks to those who came by, hope you had good luck with the CD's we handed out!
Thursday Nov 01, 2007
One of the things we developed between BeleniX and the Live Media project is the ability to run the live CD bits on USB flash drives, and indeed, that's what I mostly demo, because it's a lot faster (boot time is under a minute, install time for the OpenSolaris Developer Preview is about 7 minutes) - Jonathan loved it when we demo'ed it a couple of weeks ago. We don't push USB images yet because right now you need to already have Solaris installed in order to copy it to the USB stick. But if you do have Solaris Nevada (or have installed the preview!) already, and a copy of the preview ISO, you can make a USB flash drive for yourself, as follows:
- Use mercurial to get a copy of the Distribution Constructor repository:
hg clone ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/caiman/distro_constructor
Go into the distro_constructor/tools directory and run usbgen, this will take roughly 10 minutes:
./usbgen <path_to_iso_file> <path_to_usb_image> `pwd` <tmpdir>
- Plug your USB flash drive into the system, give the system a few seconds to see it, then run usbcopy, this will usually take 3-5 minutes, depending on your flash device; usbcopy will discover all your removable media and let you pick the right device:
./usbcopy <path_to_usb_image>
You'll need a 1 GB or larger USB flash device, since the image is 600+ MB.
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Hi,
yea. Make it into a DVD already.
* No comput...
That good news, as snv_95 includes the fix
that g...
@Edward
Your points have been consid...
what do you think about a second CD, with openoffi...
@sartek:
The problem there is what w...
Tried twice to do image-update from b93. Both fai...
Are there plans or discussion to incorporate the l...