Wednesday Dec 12, 2007
The OpenSolaris hacking session conducted by Bangalore OpenSolaris User Group received overwhelming response at FOSS.IN 2007. This was a unique event where a whole bunch of opensolaris enthusiasts got together and worked on fixing some byte size bugs. This is probably the first opensolaris hacking session conducted as part of a conference, hence it will be worth sharing the experience here for future reference.
The target audience for this session was opensolaris enthusiasts with very limited exposure on contributing to opensolaris. Given the kind of developers FOSS.IN attracts every year, we were certain that the attendees may not even be opensolaris users but they would be familiar with other unix operating systems. Driving contribution from such target audience was very challenging, especially considering that people will not even have opensolaris installed on their machines.
LiveMedia was the answer. Moinak put together a LiveDVD based on the latest (build 78) SXDE and also included opensolaris source and build tools required for compiling user land components. We put together a list of simple byte-size bugs. The idea was to fix simple bugs and understand the complete process of working with the opensolaris codebase.
A handout on contributing to solaris prepared by Ganga was a great help. We just printed more copies to give away. Apart from the detailed building instructions, the handout also describes the setup process which was actually not needed for this particular activity as all the build tools were already available on the LiveDVD. However, those steps are very important for people who would do such activity beyond the scope of this hacking session, hence we decided to give away the document as is. During the event, we found that this document saved a lot of time. Many thanks to ganga for a great contribution in helping people get their way through opensolaris codebase.
The hack-session was planned on Dec 6th, the first day of the main conference and after the project days. We decided to do registrations for this hack-session for two main reasons. One is that we would know in advance about their exposure towards opensolaris so that we could work on the setup and the list of bugs accordingly and the second is that we would get to know if everyone will get their laptops. The facilities for the Hack-center did not have many desktops and hence this was important. The OpenSolaris project days took place on Dec 4th and a lot of people who attended project days registered for the hack-center. We had total 35 registrations, which was way beyond our expectations and we had to get our act together on the last day to manage that number.
Network was really crucial for the participants to be able to look up the detailed bug information. Wifi access point was setup at the facilities, but many laptops had Broadcom wireless devices for which opensolaris does not have a driver yet. There was ethernet setup for the desktops though and we managed to put some switches to cater to the laptops with wifi driver problems. But in general, LiveDVD worked like a charm and everyone was up and running on SXDE without any issues.
Some people who did not have laptops and did not get to work on the limited number of desktops joined others and we had about about 12 groups of 2 or 3 people. Some groups had some sessions to attend and hence did not stay there for long, so we had about 8 groups focussed on hacking up some bug. I must mention the help that was there for all these participants. We had Glynn Foster, Jim Grisanzio, Ananth Srinivas, Surya Prakki, Jayakara Kini, Vijay Hn, Anil Gulecha, Ganga, Saurabh Vyas, Mayuresh Nirhali at this party. You can just imagine how much they like to share their opensolaris experience.
The obvious problem of having the liveDVD that will boot you into your build environment is that you will not have much scratch space for building the specific components. People solved the space problem by mounting the local unix filesystems or for windows only installed machines, they created zfs off a large file. Most of them used their usb keys for the scratch space. We had anticipated this problem and had a machine with 200GB of space to use just for this purpose, but the paricipants managed without that.
After about 2 hours in that room, we had 5 patches ready, which is absolutely incredible! Even though some of the bugs were simple to fix, they all learnt how to compile the specific components. Many of them also got into some build problems and we were happy to fix them, these were just the initial hurdles that everyone would see during their initial times. "Hacking opensolaris bugs is much much easier than I had thought", one of the participant said with a big smile!
OpenSolaris hackers at work
More OpenSolaris hackers at work
The hack-session was a great success, great fun for all the
participants and a really satisfying experience for all of us. We also
learnt more with these opensolaris enthusiasts. I would highly
encourage people to conduct more of such events.
Sunday Dec 09, 2007
Five days of brainstorming, discussion, presentations, demos, and lots of FUN. The best moments of FOSS.IN are captured in this video. I have added some background music too :-)
FOSS.IN 2007 might have ended, but the spirit of FOSS continues to live...
Saturday Dec 08, 2007
If you are attending FOSS.IN, head to the JN Tata auditorium now. If you have always been interested to contribute to OpenSolaris, but did not know where to start...this is the place to be. Jim Grisanzio, Community Manager for OpenSolaris is providing some practical tips to contribute to the product.
Jim Grisanzio is also a top Sun blogger. We are fortunate to have him on all the five days of the FOSS.IN conference. Thank you Jim!
Here is the link to Jim's presentation. "Ten quick ways to contribute to OpenSolaris" is part of the presentation.
Saturday Dec 08, 2007
As part of FOSS.IN 2007, a BoF on GlassFish was held. GlassFish is an enterprise-quality Java EE 5 application server that offers advanced clustering, centralized administration, and best-in-class performance built by the GlassFish community. The Java EE SDKs contain the Sun Java System Application Server (Sun's supported distribution of GlassFish). For more information, click here.
The BoF was a success with lot of people attending. Some photos from the GlassFish BoF.
Saturday Dec 08, 2007
For many people in Bangalore, it is Day 1 (of the 5-day India Pakistan cricket match). But for those attending FOSS.IN, this is the closing day (Day 5).
Outside in Bangalore today...:-)
Saturday Dec 08, 2007
Bright day outside. Brighten it up further by winning a goodie from Sun. A real simple question this time.
- What does "Sun" stand for?
- Sun is a star in the Universe
- Don't joke. Sun is not an acronym
- Scott (McNealy) Unix Network
- Standford University Network
- Sun Unix Network
Answer by leaving a comment on this blog.
Saturday Dec 08, 2007
Here is the formal announcement of the awards program.
Friday Dec 07, 2007
A short (amateur) video of the ZFS BoF held this afternoon.
Friday Dec 07, 2007
I just took a moment to create a collage called "Faces of FOSS.IN 2007". So many passionate people, lot of ideas, loads of enthusiasm. We had lots of fun too. Just one more day to go for FOSS.IN to conclude.
I wanted to paste the observations of a Mr. Gopal, a FOSS.IN attendee. Mr. Gopal sent his observations to the FOSS.IN mailing list. I have taken only the relevant portions of his mail. Full mail text is here.
At 59 years of age, I think I was the most ancient creature to attend foss-in 2007. Also the only fully grey-haired fossil in the venue. Also the only illiterate person to participate in the event. I have no software background; I graduated as a mechanical engineer, but ran a business as a pseudo-metallurgical engineer. Nobody discovered!
Why did I register for foss-in 2007? Because I didn't have any work to do at home (I stay in Bangalore). At only Rs. 600 for five lunches and 10 cups of tea and 20 biscuits and air-conditioned ambiance for five days; it appeared dirt-cheap to me (I have never come across a power-packed pure technical event like this priced so cheap!). Since I travel by public transport (Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation) with a 30 rupees-a-day pass, commuting charges did not amount to much either. And I thought: any GYAN is a bonus and a welcome one!
I attended many sessions and the inauguration. My observations and views are given below:
- You people are confident, intelligent, and articulate; and yet not arrogant.
- You dressed in a `don't care attitude' style, and yet it was not vulgar or obscene
- Some had weird hairstyles; But all heads were well above their shoulders. All heads seem to contain a load of grey matter.
- You are prime-movers of modern India.
- That you did not invite a politician or a an official of the government to do the inauguration was the best thing to have happened. The other best thing was that you invited the volunteers to light the lamp and kick-off the show.
- You showed that you are environment-friendly by giving a cloth bag as part of the conference kit.
- There was energy and good vibration all around; I took lots of it with me when I left the venue.
- It was a no-frill event; you stuck to the principle of `keep it simple'.
- Feet-tapping music during the inauguration added to the tempo.
- You people were playful, and yet serious.
- I guess the average age of the attendees must be around 30 years.
Note: After three days, I have become somewhat literate. I have already downloaded openOffice.org and started to write using that. I also plan to start writing in Hindi using some application that was discussed at the IndLinux session. Hope I am able to do that.
Best wishes to all of you.
Friday Dec 07, 2007
PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows. It is fully ACID compliant, has full support for foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures (in multiple languages). It includes most SQL92 and SQL99 data types, including INTEGER, NUMERIC, BOOLEAN, CHAR, VARCHAR, DATE, INTERVAL, and TIMESTAMP. It also supports storage of binary large objects, including pictures, sounds, or video. It has native programming interfaces for C/C++, Java, .Net, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, ODBC, among others, and exceptional documentation.
Read PostgreSQL about page for more information.
Naturally, the PostgreSQL BoF was an instant hit. Guess who conducted the BoF? None other than Josh Berkus, an acclaimed PostgreSQL leader. Click here for a brief bio of Josh Berkus.
Friday Dec 07, 2007
Anyone who has ever lost important files, run out of space on a partition, spent weekends adding new storage to servers, tried to grow or shrink a file system, or experienced data corruption knows that there is room for improvement in file systems and volume managers. The Solaris Zettabyte File System (ZFS), is designed from the ground up to meet the emerging needs of a general-purpose file system that spans the desktop to the data center.
Click here for more information on ZFS. Head out to the ZFS BoF tent to learn more about the most advanced file system on the planet.
Friday Dec 07, 2007
This white board at the Sun booth says it all! Head out to the BoF tents...NOW!
Friday Dec 07, 2007
Just concluded...a great session on free and open source by Simon Phipps. In his talk, Simon addressed several open questions on licensing, patents, and trademarks.
Notes from Simon's session
- Sun is the largest commercial contributor to open source
- Sun contributes to 750 free and open source software products
- Today, Apache software foundation and Ubuntu are very key to free software
- We operate in a "global mesh" as part of the FOSS community
- FOSS is an expression of change in society
- FOSS is not about saving money, it is about sovereignty
- Sun is engaging in open source to be part of the bigger community
- We need to learn how to handle software patents
Simon also talked about:
- Corporate behavior
- Trademark issues
- Transparency vs democracy
Simon also announced the "Sun Open Source Community Innovation Awards" in his talk.
Friday Dec 07, 2007
Welcome to today's edition of Sun quiz. As usual, please answer by leaving a comment.
- What was Java originally called?
- NetBeans
- Folk
- Oak
- Nothing. It has always been called Java
Of course, you get to grab some goodies if you give the correct answer.
|
|
|
|
you guys rock! certainly a highlight of FOSS.IN 20...