My Experiments with OpenSource Kumar Abhishek's Weblog

Hello!! Its been more than 6 months since I made my last blog entry... Sorry for that as I was busy working with loads of stuff in Sun Clusters, OpenSolaris Marketing and in Campus Ambassador Program.. But now I am back with some interesting stuff...

Sun Tech Days happened at Hyderabad from 18th Feb to 20th Feb which was attended by many many people! Many legends including James Gosling were there for the show! Joe Hartley was there for the event on 20th Feb and I took this opportunity to catch up with him about developments on education, open source and technologies to look for! Joe gave us some insights on what the future of education might be in light of growing adoption of social networking services like OSUM and penetration of the network. With help from Vasudha who is our campus ambassador at Manipal University, we recorded this pool side talk Here is the video:

It was very interesting to talk to Joe after an year of WWERC 2008 held at San Francisco where I got a chance to interview him on similar lines. Watch that video here!

On 9th of July, 450 members of GLOSS got to experience one (or I should say two) of the most amazing things of our ages! It was the OpenSolaris in Second Life!

Thanks to Terri, GLOSS got a chance to be a part of the OpenSolaris Chat in second life and we got a VIP pass! You can see the chat presentation here.. Now that we have many technical restrictions in Second Life and also that we have some network issues at SASTRA, I decided to pull all the crowd into TIFAC CORE auditorium and do a live screencast of the event, so that everyone would get to experience the chat as well as ask question. My initial expection was a crowd of just (now it sounds "just" :P) 200 students but thanks to Anand, who offered help to get it arrange for the girls in Nirman Vihar audi also. In a very short notice, we got everything arranged, and before I could realize, I was coordinating a crowd of 450 students spread across two different auditoriums (something I was doing for the first time!)

My team was present in both the auditoriums and I was coordinating everything via my cell phone! And soon the chat started! The moment everyone in the audience heard Heidi welcome, they just couldn't stop being amazed! But unfortunetly it did not last long as the experimental sound systems which was employed, crashed   So the chat was moved to Text mode... And you know how we students are.. The moment something went wrong, no one could let the opportunity to exchange some fun go :P But once the chat caught up flow, everyone was completely into the chat! I was explaing the text line by line to all the students in the audi.. And then came the part of the question and answer. Now who could let the chance of asking question to people like Tim Cramer, Stephen Hahn, David Comay and Glynn Foster! 

All this while I was in the Nirman Vihar auditorium, and then towards the end I switched to TIFAC audi! The moment I walked in, I was welcomed with so many question!! It was from every area of virtual worlds and OpenSolaris. IPS was the hot topic again in the discussion! By the time, the last set of students bid me goodnight (who eventually walked with me till my room) the time was 11:30 PM! I distributed OpenSolaris wrist bands to all the participants who stayed after 10 (and unfortunely this number was also so large that I almost exausted almost all the wrist bands I had)

Because the chat was scheduled at 8:00 PM local time, most of the students who attended the chat missed out on their dinner. I must appreciate their curiosity and desire to learn new stuff! Also any thanks to Anand and team would be less for helping me out with so many stuff! We at GLOSS never miss out of taking picutres of the events, but unfortunately this time I could not manage  

Everyone in the Sun SL team did a great job... Check out Terri's blog for the complete transcript of the OpenSolaris chat and also Angad's blog for the pictures.

After almost a month long vacation, when college reopened, we at GLOSS could not wait to do something exciting!! And what could be more exciting than Open High Availability Clusters (OHAC). I attended a talk on OHAC by Tirthankar during my recent visit of Sun India Engineering Center at Bangalore. I was completely taken by the technology and I knew I am going to do something with it, the moment I get a chance. Anyways... the day I landed in college, I sat down to set up a one node cluster on my laptop! Million thanks to Tirthankar again, who spend almost whole of his Sunday with me over the phone helping me out in setting it up. I would be blogging how set up a one node cluster on Solaris SXDE some time very very soon.

Now about the talk! There was a decent audience of more than 40 students who came to attend the talk. I started the talk with playing the Big Bucks Bunny movie, which set up the mood of the audience and also allowed me to introduce them to Network.Com and from there pick up the topic of difference between grids and clusters.

 Then I moved to the slides and I explained the architecture of OHAC and details of its functioning. It was an engrossing session, as explaining the functioning of a cluster and concepts like Disk Fencing can get tricky But it was nice to see every one interacting and asking questions to me!

Then was the turn of the Demo.. something which I was very eager to show. For this demo, I had prepared a single node cluster on my laptop. I had a zone running on which we had a cluster resource name movie-rg registered. The cluster agent was basically written to start RealPlayer on cluster and in case of a failure, it would make it failover to a functioning node of the cluster. The experience of setting up the cluster and getting the agent to work was truely amazing! As I said, I would be blogging about it soon, so check back soon. Here are two screenshots which shows how cluster took care of availability

 Now when I reboot the zone, the cluster resource becomes online on the physical node

I will soon be doing one more follow up talk on OHAC where I would discuss how to setup clusters and write agents for OHAC! Once again... thanks to Tirthankar and Swathi for helping me out with OHAC!

There can be many a times when you cannot afford to spend those valuable $$$ to prove your concept or express yourself or give you the start you are looking for Then where do you go?? Now that open source has become such a big thing, that I don't think I need to explicitly answer this question!! But then, identifying what application to use and where can get a bit daunting (As daunting as atleast 3 rounds of googling )!! Anyways, here I would like to recommend 5 open source application which can get you rolling with your concept.... Note that, each of these projects are mature enough that they can be used for every mission critical operations and you can trust them to run your whole business.

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• Netbeans is what you should be asking for if you are looking at creating any Rich Client Application quickly! Be it Database driven applications or a stand alone tiny application, Netbeans is the best choice for you! Anytime you wish to exploit the power of Java Technology then Netbeans is your man Not to forget, if you are planning to create a  nifty mobile application which you can use to adore your cell phone then look nowhere else. Many other things like Ruby, C and C++ etc. runs smoothly!
  




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• Productivity suites can be really expensive. But OpenOffice.org is an amazing Office application which is very feature packed and complete. And the best thing is that it comes sans price tag! Direct PDF convertion, native support to the ODF and MS Office formats and hundreds of other features very much make OpenOffice.org a-must application!




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• Sun xVM (VirtualBox) would allow you to run anything on anything! Run OpenSolaris on Windows, Windows on OpenSolaris, Windows on Linux and Linux on Windows and many such other combinations! VirtualBox OSE would allow you to test your applications on whatever platform you want. With a download less than 25 MB, you are ready to go to install any platform in your system without actually needing to buy any separate hardware for each platform.
  




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• Now that you have a IDE and Office plus a virtualization application in place, you would need something to run your Website. Drupal is a right choice if you are looking for a contect driven website. Written using PHP and supports both MySQL and PostgreSQL, Drupal can me made as feature rich as possible, using thousands of community contributed module!




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• XAMPP would allow you to install the comple Apache, MySQL and PHP part of the xAMPP platform. Its a simple to use and easy to download!

The beauty of all these applications are that they run on almost all popular platforms! You are free to use which ever operating system you want to run these applications. They help you get off the ground easily. Infact, if you are smart enough, you would take the extra effort to get yourself a copy of OpenSolaris, which would cost you nothing and provide you a reliable, feature full and stable development environment. And if you are considering to do a next facebook or something then check out OpenSolaris Web Stack which would give you a SAMP platform on a platter!

 These are some of the applications I like a lot in the OpenSource ecosystem. There are million others and almost any of your needs can be fulfilled in the OpenSource world!

Now tell me, doesn't open source deserve the title of biggest enabler of our century???

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I got a secret to share When everyone around the globe was impatiently waiting for OpenSolaris 2008.05 to release, on April 13, 2008, we at GLOSS got lucky!! Thanks to Micheline and Charlie, I could obtain a copy of OpenSolaris Release Candidate 0!!! Yes! we were one of the first one's to see OpenSolaris 2008.05 (exactly the way you see a baby through the ultrasound ) and we got our hands on RC0 before any other group outside Sun And then how could we wait to find out how the new desto has come out!! We did and we did it with lots of passion and zeal. 200 students tried their hands on OpenSolaris RC0, and even though RC0 only had the skeleton, (like there were no images during installation, but only the ImagePlaceHolder label was there!) everyone was deeply impressed with the ease with which they could install the distro. We collected the feedbacks towards the end of the test drive and by running through the feedback forms I we knew what the everyday user of OpenSolaris 2008.05 would like and what more they would expect! Angad did a similar thing at his campus in a very innovative way! His blog about this virtual install fest of RC0 is a must-see.

As I told you, it was a matter of pride for us to see and test OpenSolaris RC0 and everyone was overjoyed after we were done. Here is one clip which one of us shot..

I guess it will give you an idea of how passionate we, at GLOSS, feel about OpenSolaris!

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GLOSS has its newsletter out!!!!

The past academic year was very eventful at GLOSS and we decided to put the major events in form of a newsletter. So here we are, with the first issue of OpenView ! Get your copy here!

I deeply apperciate the efforts put in by  Harish,who was instrumental in designing the Newsletter. Efforts put in by Sanjeev, Abhilash and Vikas has also been very significant. Good work guys!

Do let us know how you found OpenView and things happening at SASTRA! Cheers!

Everyone was celebrating the release of OpenSolaris on May 5th, and at GLOSS, we have been busy planning the same for quite some time.. It was no doubt one of the most awaited event since Project Indiana was declared. So.. as I told everyone before.. we celebrated May 5th as Opensolaris Birthday... There was cake.. there was decorations.. there were people with celebration mood and there was the latest Technology!!!

 

Thanks to my folks at GLOSS who made this celebration possible, even though from next day on we were having our final exams! (Now I think you know why this post came so late ) Watch the video and enjoy the power of communities!