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.

• 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!