Sustaining in Open Source Era Open RPE

• Jakub Jermar presented about UltraSPARC processor architecture at CZOSUG meeting #21 on November 14th.
• Sasa Nedvedicky and Vladimir Kotal presented at Linux meeting in Usti nad Labem on November 16th,
• Paul Mitchell presented about Open High Availability Cluster at LOSUG meeting on November 21st.
• CZOSUG meeting #22 aka OpenSolaris afternoon was organized at West Bohemia University in Plzen on November 27th. Tomas Heran presented "Introduction to Solaris" and "SMF", Jakub Jermar presented "Introduction to OpenSolaris kernel", Sasa Nedvedicky presented "Zones and DTrace", and Zdenek Kotala presented "ZFS".
• Zdenek Kotala presented about PostgreSQL at Sun Tech Days in Frankfurt (December 3rd - 5th).
• FOSS.IN (December 4th - 8th) -- OpenSolaris has been selected for the project days at FOSS.IN - India's largest FOSS conference. "BeleniX & Indiana" was one of the talks in the OpenSolaris track.
• Milan Jurik and Tomas Dzik presented about OpenSolaris at Linux Users Group meeting at Novi Sad, Serbia on December 13th.
• LOSUG meeting on December 18th -- James MacFarlane presented about recently integrated Solaris 8 Migration Assistant and Isamu Shigemori presented about a command he developed, which uses the speech synthesiser library within the Java Desktop Environment screen reader for the visually impaired to aid people with a speech impediment.

This blog went silent for a few months due to main reasons -- the author was quite busy with other stuff (both work and personal related) and the summer months were rather quiet concerning Solaris RPE open source activities. The exception was LOSUG meeting in July.

So, what happened in September and October?

• Ken Tomlinson, Chris Beal, and Chris Armes presented at Sun Tech Days in Italy.
• Martin Man presented about OpenSolaris at at XXXI. EuroOpen conference.
• Two CZOSUG meetings were organized:
  • CZOSUG BootCamp about tunning and debugging of applications and systems -- the presenters were Peter Harvey, Milos Muzik, Vita Batrla, Sasa Nedvedicky, Pavel Filipensky, and Zdenek Kotala).
  • The CZOSUG #20 run at Masaryk University, Faculty of Informatics in Brno. Lukas Rovensky and Milan Jurik had there a presentation about "Introduction to OpenSolaris" (slides are in Czech) followed by demo of DTrace, ZFS and BrandZ.

• Derrick Scholl was selected to be the Chair of the Steering Committee of Forum for Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST).
• Peter Harvey presented at LOSUG meeting on June 20th about Solaris Troubleshooting – The Unofficial Tourist Guide".
• An informal CZOSUG meeting was called on June 27th to celebrate the second OpenSolaris anniversary.
• Martin Man presented about Nexenta Operating System at the seventh annual Debian Conference in Edinburgh.
• BeleniX has got the world's youngest BeleniX user.

• Lubos Kosco presented about N1 products at CZOSUG meeting on May 15th.
• Linux For You, a leading Linux Developer/open source software magazine in India, with a large readership from the corporates and developers has shipped Solaris Express, Developer Edition DVDs in its latest edition, with an article from Ananth Shrinivas. This is a result of the hard work and dedication from Joe George who has been driving OpenSolaris evangelism in India from Solaris RPE team, in fiscal year 2007.
  
• Zdenek Kotala, Julius Strofek and Jim Gates attended PGCon conference at Ottawa. Zdenek and Jim presented with Robert Lor, and Josh Berkus about Useful Solaris Tools for PostgreSQL DBAs. Julius Stroffek presented with Tomas Kovarik about Execution Plan Optimization Techniques in PostgreSQL.
• Martin Man presented about Nexenta Operating System at LinuxTag 2007 conference in Berlin.

• April 18th seems to be a popular date for OSUG meetings:
  • Calum Mackay presented at LOSUG meeting about Solaris NFS.
  • Tomas Dzik presented at CZOSUG meeting about Sun Cluster; Petr Hruska from Globalization team in Prague presented about Input Method (XKBD,IIIM/XIM)
• Lukas Rovensky presented about OpenSolaris distributions at LinuxExpo in Prague.

March was definitely month of Sun Tech Days -- Kuala Lumpur, London, Paris, ... I hope to get also pictures from all these events and update this entry.

• Chris Armes presented at Sun Tech Days in Koala Lumpur. The event was held in the week of March 6th.
  
• The London Sun Tech Days were held on 13, 14 & 15 March at Central Hall, Wesminster, London.
  • The Solaris team and other software divisions had a presence at the Tech Days with a number of our staff running demonstrations at the OpenSolaris booths.
  • Chris Armes, and Chris Beal spoke at the OpenSolaris sessions and on Tuesday 13th
  • On March 13th Simon Phipps lead the March LOSUG session, which was held at the London Sun Tech Day's venue at the end of the OpenSolaris Day.
• Sun Tech Days in Paris were held from March 19th to March 21st:
  • Chris Armes presented about "Solaris: Best Operating system on the Plannet"
  • Ken Tomlinson presented about "OpenSolaris ... In French".
  • William Roche presented about BrandZ.
  • Renaud Manus, Serge Dussud, and William Roche were at the Solaris booth.
  • FOSUG meeting was held at the end of OpenSolaris Day.
• Peter Dennis presented together with Liam Merwick, John Levon, Gary Penington and Alan Burlison at UKUUG Spring 2007 Conference in Manchester (March 19th - 21st). They presented about Zones and Ldoms and also gave away ca 80 Solaris Starter Kits.
• Frank Hofmann posted OpenSolaris capable WebRef for his psfc work.
• CZOSUG meeting #16 was held on March 6th. Moinak Ghosh, author of BeleniX presented about Livemedia technologies and Vineeth Pillai presented about BrandZ.

• CZOSUG meeting #15 was held on February 21st at premises of Faculty of Mathematics and Physisc, Charles University in Prague at Mala Strana. Martin Man presented about Nexenta and Zdenek Kotala presented about PostgreSQL on Solaris (they delivered these presentations as part of their preparations for the upcoming OpenSolaris Developer Conference in Berlin).
• LOSUG met on February 21st, the main topic was smf(5).
• Sun Tech Days in Hyderabad were held from February 21st to February 23rd. Many Solaris RPE engineers from Sun IEC in Bangalore participated in this event:
  • Madhu KR was responsible for program management of the Open Solaris Day. Madhu took also the pictures used at this blog entry -- thanks!
  • Sumitha Prashanth and Joe George did a lot of background work in terms of planning and co-ordinating. Check out also Goerge's blog.
  • Pavan Chandrashekar co-run the CodeCamp at Solaris Track day 1.
  • Sanjeev Bagewadi had a presentation about ZFS.
  • KNR had a welcome talk at the OpenSolaris day and Sriram Popuri talked about Virtualization.
    
  • Engineers at the booth -- Shantanu Gudihal, Pramod Batni, Moinak Ghosh, and Vineeth Pillai.
  • There were three simultaneous talks about Solaris in satellite cities (Pune, Delhi and Mumbai) on the first day of Sun Tech Days. Ananth Shrinivas talked in Pune, Pradhap Devarajan talked in Mumbai, and Shivani Khosa talked in Delhi.
    
  • Two OpenSolaris Users Groups were created -- Hyderabad OSUG and OSUG in Kolkatta. Moinak Ghosh led a highly interactive discussion at the first HOSUG meeting on how to build an OpenSolaris distribution based on his BeleniX experience.

December 2006

• CZOSUG meeting #13 was held at premises of Faculty of Mathematics and Physisc, Charles University in Prague at Mala Strana. Jiri Cervenka had a presentation about Mercurial / hg(1).
• Ken Tomlinson and Serge Dussud presented about OpenSolaris at university ENSIMAG in France on December 22.
• BOSUG organized meeting with the topic "Getting started with OpenSolaris".
• Chris Beal presented about virtualisation at LOSUG meeting.

January 2007

• CZOSUG meeting #14 was held at premises of Faculty of Mathematics and Physisc, Charles University in Prague at Mala Strana. Jan Kopriva had presentation about OpenGrok and Darren Reed presented about Advances in Solaris Networking (IPFilter, Crossbow, NEMO").

• Sun Tech Days were held in Prague from November 14th to November 16th. Many people from our organizition participated on this event:
  • Chris Armes had keynotes at OpenSolaris Day and Solaris Development track.
  • Chris Beal presented about OpenSolaris Virtualization Technologies.
  • Engineers from the Solaris RPE and NPE teams in Prague prepared four booths with demos concerning OpenSolaris Installation, DTrace, BrandZ and SunRay. The main owners of the stands were Vlada Kotal, Vlada Marek, Vita Batrla and Marcel Telka.

    

  • Milos Muzik and Jiri Cervenka prepared LiveUSB BeleniX image for OpenSolaris memory stick. These sticks were given was given away during several OpenSolaris presentations.

    

  • Lukas Rovensky had presentation about OpenSolaris at University Day.
• CZOUSG meeting #12 was held at the end of OpenSolaris Day at Sun Tech Days in Prague.
• Vita Batrla, Milan Jurik, and Lukas Rovensky visited West Bohemia University in Pilsen and presented there about OpenSolaris.
• Lukas Rovensky visited with Teresa Giacomini Department of Computers at Czech Technical University and Department of Software Engineering at Charles University and discussed there options concerning usage of OpenSolaris in computer science curriculum.
• Milan Jurik visited Department of Computer Science at FEI VŠB Technical University Ostrava and presented there about OpenSolaris.
• FOSS in India:
  RPE India lead the Sun India participation at FOSS.IN 2006. This is India's premiere and most focussed FOSS(Free and Open Source Software) event. Sun had a very visible presence for the second time with a lot of media coverage.
  The full details of our participation, check out the blogs of Manjula Kandula and Ananth Shrinivas.
  
  • Diann Olden did a press interview for Times of India.
  • Engineers from the Bangalore Solaris RPE teams particpated at FOSS, a lot of information can be found at Joe George's blog. A quick summary:
    
  • Press Coverage from:
  • Times of  India - on the front page
  • The Hindu
  • Headlines Today & Aaj Tak TV Channel
  • Red Herring
    
  • Headlines Today (a TV news channel in India) ran a story on BeleniX a day before FOSS.in 2006! It was about Anil Gulecha, a Bangalore student who created the LiveUSB toolkit for BeleniX. The program also interviews Moinak Ghosh, Lead Developer of BeleniX and Nageswara Rao, Site Lead (Acting) for Sun, India Engineering Center. And Jonthan Schwartz mentions about Anil in his blog as well.
    
  • Anil Gulecha, the student who created the LiveUSB version of BeleniX presented on BeleniX at FOSS.IN. It was the last talk before the closing key note, and we had a full house. People sat on the stairs and stood wherever they could.
  • One of the lead developers for KDE, Aaron Seigo was at FOSS.IN 2006. Moinak and Aaron had a long chat. For more details read the blog entry of Joe G.
• LOSUG meeting was held on November 15th and the main topic was FMA
• BOSUG meeting was held on December 9th and the main topic was Introduction to OpenSolaris. We had over 35 members show up. Videos of the meeting will be posted on YouTube soon.
  
• Server Watch reviewed BeleniX. More details available here.
• Joe G, Sumitha Prashanth and Vineeth Pillai went to JSS Academy of Technology, Bangalore to talk about OpenSolaris. Trip report is here.
• OpenSolaris Newsletter for November features the activities of RPE India Team on OpenSolaris evangelism. More details available here.
• Sudheer Abdul Salaam, Pradhap Devarajan and Ananth Shrinivas are a part of the team which delivered a training on OpenSolaris Internals to the Computer Science Faculty from 6 Indian Engineering Colleges.
• And to check out how passionate folks are about OpenSolaris, please read this blog entry.
  

 

• George Wilson presented about Chime -- A Visualization Tool for DTrace -- at ATLSOG meeting on October 10.
• BeleniX celebrated the first birtday on October 12 -- congratulations!
• eWeek published a story on OpenSolaris under OpensSolaris options show promise. BeleniX is reviewed in this article.
• Joe George blogged about LiveUSB toolkit for BeleniX.
• Anil Gulecha, the student who developed the LiveUSB toolkit for BeleniX became a Sun Campus Ambassador.
• BeleniX was reviewed by eWeek, see the complete article (a review of all OpenSolaris distros). BeleniX also figures in the slideshow, check this out.
• A new logo for Bangalore OpenSolaris Users Group (BOSUG) was created.
• Narayana Janga and Shivani Khosa presented at ApacheCon in Austin about "OpenSolaris Zones: Web server and application consolidation".
• London OpenSolaris User Group (LOSUG) is back! They had a "Renaissance" meeting on October 18 and the topic was "OpenSolaris Security With a Close Eye on RBAC".
• CZOSUG organized in Prague a Xen BootCamp on October 21. This was the second all-day CZOSUG meeting and the main organizers were Martin Man and Milan Jurik. See the invitation at Czech Unix portal root.cz and reports from the meeting at ug-discuss list and Lukas Rovensky's blog.
• PAVAN C presented about Solaris Device Drivers at BOSUG meeting on October 28.
• People from the Grenoble site (Serger Dussud, William Roche, Alex Chartre, Renaud Manus) contribute to the French OpenSolaris User Group Forum

• BeleniX becomes more and more popular LiveCD distribution based on OpenSolaris. It is mentioned in a Server Watch magazine article.
• Belenix 0.5 has been released! The new version features:
  • The significant feature of this release is support for read-only mounting and accessing both Ext2FS and NTFS partitions on either Primary or Logical Partitions.
  • Updated to a recent pre-build48 snapshot of OpenSolaris.
  • The utilities from NTFSprogs provide read-write access to NTFS Primary partitions as well.
  • The Partition Table Viewer utility has been integrated. Execute "prtpart -help" for a detailed guide.
  • A small GUI written in Tcl/Tk is available to access and mount harddisk partitions at the click of a mouse.
  • Xfce has been upgaded to 4.4 Beta2. This now supports a new-look with desktop icons and a new file manager called Thunar.
  • Firefox and Thunderbird have been upgraded to 1.5.0.7, and various other driver updates.
  • The Installer has been enhanced and Experimental support has been added to create a ZFS Filesystem on a non-root slice.
  Read the blogs of Moinak Ghosh, creator of BeleniX.
• Chris Beal, Pete Dennis, and Martin Man attended EuroOSCON and presented about OpenSolaris.
• Jiri Sasek and Petr Sumbera visited The SNIA's 2006 Storage Developer Conference and presented Sun's Samba solution there.
• Solaris Developer website is going to contain a weekly quiz and initial 160 questions and answers were needed. The OP/N1 RPE engineers from Bangalore have put together 140 questions, and a few other questions came out from the people in OP/N1 RPE EMEA.
• RPE India (Moinak Ghosh, Saurabh Vyas, and Prabodh Goel) joined Software Freedom Day 2006 celebrations in Bangalore.
• BOSUG meeting held on 23 Sep 2006. Major attraction was the demo of BeleniX booting from USB by Anil Gulecha, a student from a Bangalore college. Now the system boots to an xfce desktop in under 30 seconds.
• Video recording from Sun Grid Engine Presentation at CZOSUG #7 by Lubos Kosco and Martin Man was released. Many thanks to Audiovisual Centre Silicon Hill!

The famous "Hello, world!" message is usually the first message to be printed at a console when someone learns a new programming language. Since this is the first entry of a blog, which aims to report an Open Source related activities of software engineers in OP/N1 Revenue Product Engineering department I could not resist to use it as a title for this post.

Solaris Revenue Product Engineering is a department within the Solaris organization at Sun responsible for sustaining Solaris and related products (for example, PostgreSQL, SunCluster, or N1 Service Provisioning System). Many of the products we are dealing with are open sourced, starting with Solaris sources released in the OpenSolaris project, continuing with product actively co-developed by Sun (for example, JavaDB) and finishing with a number of freeware products delivered with Solaris.

Our engineers are also involved in many Open Source activities and projects, for example, BeleniX, a free x86 Crash Dump Analysis book, Bangalore OpenSolaris Users Group, Czech OpenSolaris Users Group and many others.