Fore!Stray shots from Dave Miner |
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If you're thinking of buying a copy of OpenSolaris Bible through Amazon, please consider doing so via the OpenSolaris Bookstore. See Simon's blog entry, OpenSolaris - Changing The World Another Way [on Simon Phipps, SunMink], for more details on this initiative.
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This is just a quick note to publicize the fact that additional sample chapters from OpenSolaris Bible are now available for free download in PDF form from opensolaris.com. The Table of Contents, Index, and Chapter 1 were previously posted on the book's web site, but we didn't feel that was a particularly representative sample of the book's content, since Chapter 1 is really introductory material to the overall OpenSolaris project, while the remaining 900+ pages are about the technology. As a result, we've worked with Wiley and the OpenSolaris marketing team (and thanks to both for supporting this!) to provide free downloads of additional contents to give potential buyers a better sample of the book.
Chapter 3 should be especially valuable to those new to OpenSolaris, as it's a 54-page "crash course" introduction to using OpenSolaris, introducing you to the basics you'll need in the first day or two after installation. Chapter 8 covers ZFS, and is more representative of the bulk of the book: it's a 40-page tour of the capabilities of this key feature of OpenSolaris.
I hope you'll find these samples useful and thank all those who've already bought the book!
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As I noted to my friends on Facebook last night, a few of the pre-orders of OpenSolaris Bible have been delivered. I also note this morning that Amazon says it's in stock (and the sales rank has really jumped)! So if you're one of those impatient types who needs more immediate gratification, you can now order and have it in your hands next day. Ironically, neither Nick, Jerry nor I has received our own copies yet. Coincidentally, it was a year ago today that I got the Mercurial repository that we used for the project fully on-line. Seems like an eternity, to be honest.
I'd also like to thank the website community for giving it the feature spot on opensolaris.org, which has to be helping that sales rank!
By the way, if you come to CommunityOne East in New York next month, you'll be able to get at least two of us to sign your copies, as Nick and I are signed up to deliver one of the sessions there.
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Today we released the latest OpenSolaris development build, number 106 (106a is used in the labeling of the various ISO images since it took a couple of spins to get it right). As usual, see the announcement email for links and so on. Although I note that we neglected to mention the availability of images via our friends at genunix.org. We apologize, Al, and thank you for your continued service. I'll proofread better next time!
The big news today is that this marks the first build with SPARC support. At this time, the only installation option for SPARC is to use the Automated Installer (AI), which means you'll need to set up an AI server first. Initial instructions are posted for this piece, questions and discussion should be directed to the caiman-discuss project mailing list. The interesting IPS development that goes along with this is the release of fat (or phat) package support; there aren't separate repositories for x86 and SPARC, but instead a single repository with unified package instances. Perusing a package manifest such as that of SUNWcs should give you some clues on how this works, but I'll let someone on the IPS team provide a more complete discussion of this feature.
Many thanks to all of the team who worked very hard since the 2008.11 release to get to this milestone!
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As I was getting my hair cut the other night, the stylist asked if I had any New Year's resolutions. Only one: to work less than last year. Now, if you judge by my output to this blog over the past year, you'd say I was already slacking pretty well: 15 posts, most of which categorize as announcing OpenSolaris developments. Of course, that's not a particularly fair criterion since we've kicked ass on two full releases of OpenSolaris, plus previews, a special student kit, and bi-weekly (more or less) development builds.
Nevertheless, I've been working basically two jobs, and writing a lot. More than I ever have in my life. All that prose (plus the equally length contributions of my co-authors, Nick and Jerry) will be published in the next few weeks, in OpenSolaris Bible.
The Amazon page has been up for close to six months now, so a few lost souls have stumbled upon it already and, apparently, pre-ordered. I admire the patience of those who did - I'm usually not patient enough to pre-order anything, let alone six months early!
Like Jerry, this was my first venture into the publishing arena, and honestly, I wouldn't have without Nick, who was the originator of the project. Nick's prior experience with Professional C++ meant we'd at least have a clue about how we should do things. The draft proposal he'd written was also very comprehensive. Even so, I still had a lot of trepidation, since I knew how much work I had on my plate with getting the 2008.05 release ready and the 6-month cycle we're targeting for further releases. It probably helped that I'd just come off a 3-week vacation when Nick got in touch with me; burnout had receded a bit. But my wife said the one thing that tipped me over to signing up: it's unlikely you'll look back in 5 years and regret having done it, but you might regret not doing it. With that, 2008 became a blur of working long days on the distro, then spending the evenings writing about it. Hence my New Year's resolution.
As Jerry noted in his blog entry (which also includes the table of contents, which I won't repeat here), it was a pretty equal collaboration, with the chapters split among us. Identifying which ones we each wrote is a good parlor game, I guess, but if you've read past entries here or looked at my opensolaris.org profile you can easily figure out many of the ones I wrote. It's a big book, not far from 1000 pages, and covers the breadth of the operating system for users and administrators, primarily those with little or no OpenSolaris experience, though I'm sure an experienced user will be able to learn a lot as well. We all certainly did in the process of writing it!
We also really tried to eat open source dogfood in the writing process. OpenSolaris was of course the OS we used, and OpenOffice was used in generating the manuscript; all of the files submitted to Wiley had to be in Microsoft Word format, but we were quite successful in generating those from OpenOffice. We exchanged material primarily using Mercurial, with the master repository hosted on my OpenSolaris server. The only point at which I had to venture off into proprietary software was during the final review, which was in PDF format, where Acrobat was needed to mark up the files. That one was a bit complicated, since there isn't a current version of it for OpenSolaris. However, I had good luck running the Linux version under Ubuntu inside a Virtual Box VM hosted on OpenSolaris. Virtual Box was a very important tool, used in generating many of the examples and screen shots in the book.
I look forward to the book's release and the feedback from reviews. There are certainly things I think could be better, and we'll see if those are at all similar to what readers think!
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Over this past weekend I visited the CES show in Las Vegas for the first time. It was pretty cool for gadget freaks, though I didn't get to see anywhere near everything. But one booth I did stop into was Toshiba's, and found a nice surprise:
Pretty cool to see your work on display at "the world's largest consumer technology tradeshow", a claim none of my buddies could make!
Update: See the press releases from Sun and Toshiba for more information on availability.
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In recognition of today's official launch of OpenSolaris 2008.11, I thought I'd write a bit about the new tool used to build the various images you can download, known as the Distribution Constructor (DC for short, of course).
Solaris releases, including SXCE, are built using a Sun-internal toolkit known as the CDkit (the name is subtly humorous now that we're no longer releasing CD's for SXCE due to media size issues). It's a complex beast, with requirements for raw disk slices and other odd bits of configuration that make it forbidding to all but the most determined user. That might not seem like a big deal at first glance, but one result of its (earned) reputation is that almost nobody actually builds their own Solaris installation images. Most projects that affect the installation environment end up doing their testing by hand-modifying netinstall images. The predictable, and all too frequent, result over the years has been breakage of the installer as projects or bug fixes were added to the product. When we started work on Caiman, it was clear that a course correction would be required to help us keep a consistent level of quality in the installation software. Our decision to build the OpenSolaris distribution as a redistributable, remixable package base led to the requirement for a construction tool which shared those characteristics, too. Finally, we've long had Solaris customers who needed to build their own customized installation images. That wasn't a function provided by the product, so the need was met with various semi-official blueprint documents with instructions on building derivatives for private use, but this was far from ideal since those would usually lag behind changes to the product.
The starting point for DC was the Live Media toolkit that Moinak and I hacked on as a side project for most of 2006 and 2007, which was derived from his early work on BeleniX. That was really just a single script that could build a live CD or DVD (depending on the list of packages provided to it), and we used a version of it modified to use IPS packages to build the preview releases and the 2008.05 release. Over the summer, DC's development reached the point where it could take over this task, and we switched to it for building the images in September.
The basic function of the DC is pretty simple: given a set of packages as input, produce a bootable, installable media image as output. Flexibility, however, is a requirement, as Sun is no longer intending to build just a single Solaris product out of the source base, but instead a range of related, specialized products, such as xVM Server; there's obvious advantage to sharing tooling across them. And there's the previously-mentioned requirements to support both public and private derivatives. Thus, the core of DC is a build engine that uses an XML recipe to install a set of IPS packages, and then runs a series of steps, known as finalizer scripts (though there's no requirement that they actually be scripts) to transform that basic package image into the various product images, which at this release consist of two different live CD ISO images, corresponding USB flash memory stick images, and an ISO image that's used by the automated installation setup tools to configure an automated installation service.
If you were to ask the developers on the Caiman team to name the single thing they like best about DC, the landslide winner would be its checkpointing feature. Simply, the DC uses ZFS snapshots to save the progress of the construction process at key points along the way, allowing the process to be paused and restarted at the various checkpoints. This is a huge productivity boon for distribution developers because the construction process can be quite time- and resource-intensive, and is a great example of how basic technology like ZFS can be exploited to make other products better in ways that would be difficult, if not impossible, to do without it. The DC is not strictly dependent on ZFS, as it will work on a UFS file system, but in that case you lose checkpoints.
At this point in time the DC is purely a command-line tool, and requires you to edit the XML manifest to customize the produced images. As noted, it's a resource-intensive process: you'll want to have good bandwidth to an IPS package repository, fast processors (at least a dual-core 2 GHz processor), and perhaps 8 GB of disk space for DC's work area. You'll need to start by installing the SUNWdistro-const package, then use the shipped example manifest (/usr/share/distro_const/slim_cd/slim_cd.xml for the primary languages image or /usr/share/distro_const/slim_cd/all_lang_slim_cd.xml for the global image) as a starting point. Note that you'll have to run the distro_const(1M) tool as root in order to successfully construct a distribution. Once you've installed the DC package, you can try building your own copy of the primary languages ISO with the simple command:
$ pfexec distro_const build /usr/share/distro_const/slim_cd/slim_cd.xml
It'll take a while, but if all goes well you'll have your very own OpenSolaris.iso in /rpool/dc/media.
We'll be continuing to develop and enhance DC in future releases; if you're interested in participating, come pitch in on the Caiman project!
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Late yesterday we released the second release candidate for 2008.11, see the announcement mail for the links and so on:
[indiana-discuss] pkg.opensolaris.org package repository update (build 101b/RC2)
Combing through the message, you'll find several noteworthy changes, including:
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Last night we posted the first release candidate build for the 2008.11 release. The announcement message has the details on how to get it and so on. One very important limitation to point out is that this image will not install when booted in a system (or virtual machine) with 512 MB of memory. Several of us are working on getting this resolved prior to the official release. The announcement message specifies 768 MB of memory, since that's the next likely number found on real machines, but I'd expect installation to be successful with somewhere around 580 MB with this image, for those of you using virtual machines of some sort.
One notable change is that we've decided to start releasing pre-built images for USB flash memory devices. You will need to use Solaris/OpenSolaris to create them, as the usbcopy script used to transfer them uses some Solaris-specific interfaces. Contributions to make this work on other platforms would be welcomed, of course.
The installer has changed very little since 2008.05, as our installation efforts have been spent on building the Automated Installation preview, the Distribution Constructor, and adding zones support to the Snap Upgrade boot environment management code. Though I should mention that there are some nice new graphic billboards during the install process itself!
Please give it a try and help us get the last bit of polish on this release before it goes final. If you find bugs, check out the notes on how to report bugs.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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:
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