Collected thoughts and musings George's Sun Blog

In September, 2008 we released a pre-configured, self-contained Hadoop environment bundled onto an OpenSolaris live cd (see http://opensolaris.org/os/project/livehadoop/).  This effort was designed to provide end users, developers, and students with a very easy-to-use Hadoop environment with minimal configuration and setup.  So far that effort has been well received, and over 11,000 downloads of the CD have been made to date!

We're busy working on the second version of OpenSolaris Live Hadoop, and I wanted to put some of the new features out there for what to expect

New updates in the works:

• Hadoop 0.19
• OpenSolaris 2008.11 (with vastly improved laptop support)
  
• The ability to boot off of a CD, DVD, or USB stick
• Inclusion of JDK 6 with the Java compiler and related tools
  

Cool new features

• The new build process we are using to make the live cd should make it much easier to include your own custom packages and data onto the cd.  This means that you should be able to create live images for your particular environment with your own courseware, sample data, documentation, or assignments on it.
  
• Inclusion of trace support (based on X-Trace and DTrace).  This trace support should make understanding the internals of Hadoop easier and provide improved visibility into what is happening.  Expect this support to improve over time.
  
• HBase, an open-source BigTable implementation

If you have any requests or recommendations, please let me know.  As for time frame, we're looking at February, assuming the new build process (based on OpenSolaris 2008.11) works as we expect.  Stay tuned!