Alfred Peng's Weblog: The life with OpenSolaris and Mozilla

Four OpenSolaris Songbirds had a nice get together in the OpenSolaris developer Summit May 2008. Steve also invited us to the Songbird office(Ken, sorry that we didn't find you in C1 :( ). It's a wonderful place, full of openness, flexibility and creation.

The Songbird talk went smoothly and great. I love this kind of teamwork talk and people focus on different parts of the talk. Steve led the talk in an easy and interactive way. Albert, Ken and I talked about the porting efforts, the extensions and feathers.

As the release of OpenSolaris 2008.05, it's a better approach to make Songbird into IPS repository first.

After some trivial changes to the source code, Songbird 0.5 has been built on Solaris SPARC b76 with Sun Studio 11 successfully by using the Songbird SFE spec. I've tried the tarball and pkgadd binaries on my SPARC b80 box. It works fine:) Thanks a lot to the Songbird guys(especially stevel and preed) on hosting the x86 builds and SPARC builds(tarball/pkgadd) for Songbird 0.5.

Is Songbird ready to be delivered into Solaris Nevada?

- The license issue has been sorted out. We won't link XULRunner with flash plugin by default. FYI, this is just a walk around for Songbird+XULRunner+flash plugin. We'd still hope that Songbird could re-license for this combination.

- Rhythmbox has just been re-licensed. That's to say, Solaris can ship it with mp3 decoder now. But we're still waiting for the status of sound-juicer and gnome-sound-recorder who also use gstreamer+mp3 decoder. Only when all of these are resolved, we can put mp3 decoder back into Solaris Nevada.

- Does it matter to put two media player applications to Solaris? How will users choose from them? Steve has given an introduction of Songbird. It's also mentioned that Songbird has plan to provide CD playback/ripping feature in the near future. That's great news! But I'm not sure there is interests to add sound recorder funtionality to it. The video part for Songbird works just fine after I built some extra codecses and installed into the system. Well, still need to have some improvement to it to compare with mplayer.

Indiana might be a good vehicle to host Songbird somewhere.

Just some updates, the Songbird 0.5 package for OpenSolaris is available here. The spec file to make this build is checked into the SFE repository. Please note that Songbird will be installed in /usr/bin and /usr/lib. And the support comes from the Songbird community(which I should be considered one of them).

As I've noted in the last post, Songbird could play some video formats. So to have some codes that easy to install could be a big help for Solaris users. Glynn filed a bug in OpenSolaris bugzilla to track this. I guess that we should build up a pkg repository somewhere and start to contribute the codes binaries.

Songbird 0.5 build for Solaris Nevada x86 is now available for download here. It's built on Solaris Nevada b80 x86 box with Sun Studio 11. The release notes is here. Please file bug in Songbird bugzilla or get people on the Songbird IRC if you find any problem for it.

I also tried to compile the ffmpeg gstreamer plugin on the same Solaris box. It works well with Songbird for mp4/mov/mpeg/vob... Well, is there any plan for Songbird on the video part?:-)

Mar. 31st 2008 is a special day for the open source world. It's the 10th anniversary for Mozilla.

Ten years before, I was studying hard back to high school, trying to pass the college entrance exam to come to Beijing, without any idea about Open Source. And now, I'm enjoying all the power and freedom brought by Open Source: Solaris Nevada(GNOME 2.20/Firefox 3.0b4/Thunderbird 2.0.0.x/Songbird 0.5/StarOffice 8/DTrace/ZFS...).

Mozilla changes our life with 10 years' time. I really look forward to the next ten years.

Just before the Firefox 3.0 beta 5 code freeze time(several hours ago), the patches(bug 391361/423674) to enable the crash reporting for OpenSolaris on Mozilla platform are finally accepted by Breakpad and Mozilla. Many thanks for the review from Ted Mielczarek. And also the whole community to accept them at this last moment.

Then what is the crash reporting tool for? People who have Windows experience should know that there might be a dialog pops up after a process crashes sometimes. You can select "send the error report" or not. Well, this tool has the similar purpose. With it enabled on Firefox, we can send the crash report to the server and also query/view the report in detail. Then the Mozilla developers can prioritize the reports and fix them accordingly. Even more, some quality analysis can be done based on all the reports in the database. So hey, don't hesitate to send the report, that's a big help to the community:)

To make everything available to the Solaris users, several other things still need to be figured out first.

1. Get the permission to upload the Firefox symbols for Solaris to the community symbols server(The architecture might be helpful to understand). Then the server will be responsible to generate the final human readable report based on the symbols.

2. Add "OpenSolaris" to the server's platform list.

After that, this feature will be enabled for the Solaris contributed build for Firefox after 3.0, maybe also the Firefox packages for Indiana.

BTW, this could also be enabled for Songbird on Solaris.

In case some guys are interested in this. Would like to give some updates for the porting efforts.

Songbird can be launched on my Solaris box successfully and playback view is correctly shown. The mp3 files can be played without problem. If you're interested in playing with it on Solaris Nevada, feel free to download from here.

This was built on Solaris Nevada b80 x86 box with Sun Studio 11, based on the snapshot of XULRunner 2008-02-21/Songbird 2008-03-05. Just extract it and run "./songbird" should be fine.

Good luck, guys!

Songbird is a desktop media player mashed-up with the Web, built on top of the XULRunner platform. I like the following words the best:

"Songbird promises to be the Firefox of media players."  —Aaron Boodman

Well, bad news is that it doesn't run on Solaris yet. A project has been created in OpenSolaris community for this porting effort: Nightingale. I like this project name a lot because I love Yani's Forbidden City concert a lot, especially Nightingale.

On the first ever OpenSolaris summit last year, Albert and I talked about the possibility of porting Songbird to Solaris. Since Stephen Lau now works in Songbird, I think it's a great opportunity to join the force and make it available.

I've put my porting status here in the Songbird forum. Thanks a lot for the response from Mig. Mook also joined this, started to hack around Solaris and also tried to build Songbird on it. The porting is still ongoing. We'd like to get help from whoever feel interested.

Then how to make the Songbird build on Solaris? It's pretty simple I think, with CBE installed on your Solaris box, a spec file here and a patch here. The instruction is as below:

1. Install CBE on your Solaris box.

2. Download the spec file(rename to SFEsongbird.spec) and patch(songbird-01-solaris.diff). Do remember to convert the spec/patch to unix format by using dos2unix.

3. Check out the SFEs: svn co https://pkgbuild.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/pkgbuild/spec-files-extra/trunk SFE and put the spec and the patch in SFE directory.

4. run the command: . /opt/jdsbld/bin/env.sh; pkgtool --download build -v SFEsongbird.spec. Then just wait... the time depends on how fast is your machine.

Any further problem, please feel free to let me know.

Update: please get my latest spec and patches(1 to songbird-01-solaris.diff, 2 to songbird-02-staticstring.diff). The second patch has been checked into the Songbird trunk.

The new year 2008 is coming to us. Wish every one a happy and healthy new year! Welcome to the Beijing 2008 Olympics!

  恭  喜 发 财， 万  事  如 意

 Gong Xi Fa Cai, Wan Shi Ru Yi

Wish you make lots of money and every thing you want can become true! 

It has been one month since I came back home from the hospital. And everything goes fine. I can walk without the help of crutch now, although it's still not so stable.

It's just painful to do the physical exercises everyday, especially to bend the knee with force. However, I've made some progress and the knee can be bent to about 130 degree. On the other side, to strengthen the muscle is also important. That's the basis for the next steps such as walking, running and even get back to the basketball court.

It's snow today, the first snow in Beijing this year.

I've already came back home from the hospital for several days. In the following several weeks, I'll do some exercises to recover as the doctor told.

The surgery last for about 2 hours and it went fine. It's a weird feeling that I couldn't feel my legs during the surgery and also saw everything(ligament, meniscus, bones and also the operations...) inside my knee on a monitor. When the anaesthesia went away, the pain stroke me a lot.

Oh, man! Health is really the most important thing for us. Take care, guys. 

I'll take the knee surgery next Monday and be not available after that for several weeks.

Some small accident happened in the morning of the second day. Since the plan was to head to Santa Clara at night, we packed all the stuff and drove to the meeting by ourselves instead of taking the shuttle bus. But we got lost in the mountain area:( After driving for some distance, the environment didn't look familiar and we had to go back. The OpenSolaris Sign saved us at that moment. It pointed us to make a right turn and lead to the parking location.

The second day's first session was the lightning talk. It provided us a good chance to give some short topics(with audio):
* Ben Rockwood's talk
* Jim Walker: OpenSolaris test farm
The test farm includes Sun Fire T2000, Sun Fire X4200 M2 and Sun Fire X4600 M2. You can go to the test farm project page to reserve one to have a try. The users can access all these boxes through terminal. Is that possible that the GUI access could be provided in the future?
* Alfred Peng: Mozilla DTrace
I didn't explain so much on the technical side of Mozilla DTrace. It's more about the cooperation with Mozilla community. DTrace is proved to be a good approach to introduce Solaris to another community, with the landing of the Mozilla DTrace framework, the Javascript probes, and also performance bugs fixed by Robert. To me, Mozilla community is one of the most successful communities in the open source world, with thousands of active code contributors, hundred thousands(or millions) of test contributors and evangelists, tens of millions of users, hundreds of millions of downloads. It's huge! OpenSolaris can benefit from this cooperation for sure. The development model is also another aspect that OpenSolaris community could learn from.
* Al Hopper: Genunix
* David Stewart: Intel driver support
David is from Intel. Laptop support is a hot point that Solaris users pay lots of attentions to. The "power suspend and resume" is just so necessary for laptop users. It takes me several minutes to boot the Solaris system every time. But for Mac OS users, just several seconds. A big different! It seems that the difficult part is on the power resume side. Hope that it can be resolved soon.
* Jorg Shilling: OpenSolaris book in German
It's a pity that I don't understand German. But I'm still curious who takes this book finally?:)
* Glynn Foster: What's community?
One of functions of the community is to connect people, from different parts of the world, and also stimulate information sharing and facilitate friendship. I can't agree with this more.
* Brian Gupta: User Group

Following are the sessions:
* Sara Dornsife: Naming and Branding
From the developers' point of view, the concern is the performance. String/Logo could have some impact on the performance. The release model is still the point that all the audiences felt interested. What's the relationship between distribution and the community projects? OpenSolaris community provide a platform for all the projects. Some of them are still under development. The users can download the release/experiment builds by themselves and have a try. There will be Stable/Unstable branches for the distribution to hold all of them.
Another thing I want to mention here is the intense relationship between Mozilla community and Debian, because of the Firefox/Thunderbird trademark issue. This seems to be one kind of fragmentation for Mozilla. But I still feel that merge is the way to go for Mozilla and Debian. The problem is just how to cooperate to handle the big patch that Debian has.

* Glynn Foster/Stephen Lau/Alan Coopersmith: Community Structure and Involvement
What's the power of OGB(OpenSolaris Governing Board)? This must be a question for a lot of community guys. OpenSolaris community is a big community with many different projects. Every one of them have different interests. OGB doesn't have the power to control them. One big task for OGB is the development direction and promotion I think. For example, to provide better basic infrastructure for the community, to take some action to make decision when there are conflicts within the community itself, between different sub communities or with other communities, to promote OpenSolaris communities to other organizations and communities, and also, to stimulate communication and connection for different parts of the community.

* Shawn Walker, one community contributor, stated the problems he met when he tried to do some code contribution to OpenSolaris. To my understanding, OpenSolaris community isn't very developer friendly for some certain aspects for other guys to contribute, with the existing of some private processes. That's the thing need to be improved in the future. Meanwhile, it's lucky for the OpenSolaris community to have all these awesome contributors even with the obstacle ahead. That's why open source is so important, and how powerful open source community is. It makes many people fly more than 12 hours to come to a same place from different parts of the world, and the goal is quite simple: to make OpenSolaris a better community.

* Tim Foster: ZFS to the MAX
How does Indiana make use of ZFS? At least, it can do some help to replace the Live Upgrade to Snap Upgrade. Tim's demo is based on a USB snapshot disk. Network could also be a choice. The GUI of this upgrade can be improved a little bit. This could be a place that the desktop team get involved.

* Glynn hosted the desktop sessions, about the desktop menu(to be more Ubuntu like?), the NWAN GUI design, the desktop search. Erwann demoed about Compiz, which is pretty cool and attractive. People are quite interested on whether there is plan to deliver it into Solaris. The package repository will be a solution to this. Users can get the compiz package by themselves with Indiana.

Ian Murdock gave the wrap up at last. It's great to know that this event will be held every 6 months. I can't imagine how cheerful people will be when Indiana is released the next time. With the successful experience, the next summit will be a bigger one, with more participants I believe.

It's wonderful to meet with Erwann, Alo, Glynn, Tim and all the other guys in this event. Have dinner together, chat with each other and see all the guys face to face are a great way for communication. I really had a lot of fun this time.

Then how about the summit itself? It's well-organized and the facilities are nice. Thanks for the team, especially Jessy.

As the first priority task for the next few months is Indiana, Indiana is the focus for the first day. The welcome session was delivered by Ian Murdock. He gave a general talk on the topics we were going to discuss: the distribution model, the new installer, the new package system, modernization and the distribution constructor. This is the first time I met Ian. When Debian came out as a Linux distribution, the apt-get command changed our life. I can still remember the Debian related discussion between some friends and I back in the university:-)

The round table introduction session was great, with everyone involved, and I love this part. It set the fundamental key that people in this community could have a free platform to communicate, without any title. People from Sun(management team and engineers) showed their participation enthusiasm, interests, attentions and supports to the future development of OpenSolaris community. The community contributors also expressed their ideas, suggestions and concerns. The summit opens a channel for the communication between people from Sun and people in the community. And we were trying to build up some common understanding about this community.

Here I'd like to drag the topic a little bit far away. As an engineer works for Sun and joins an external community(Mozilla community), I prefer influence than control over an open source community. Different parties have their influence can help the community to grow in a benign way. If we want to make the decisions based on democracy, communication becomes the most important thing. I believe that's the purpose of the summit.

Following are the sessions, some with slides, audio recording and meeting minutes:
Stephen Hahn: Image Packaging System slides audio minutes
When I migrated from Linux to Solaris, one thing I wanted to have is just the packaging system. Blastware partly resolves the problem at that time. Just like the apt-get changes our life, this new image packaging system could be the key point to make Solaris much more user/developer friendly.

Dave Miner: Installation and distribution constructor slides audio minutes
It was mentioned that Developers will be the first priority, and enterprises later for Indiana. That's a great news for all the open source communities I think. The LiveCD demo was also good. BTW, the desktop China team also gets involved in the Caiman project, which is already in SXDE III.

David Comay: Modernization audio minutes
This brought some hot discussions in the OpenSolaris community before. Familiarity means a lot of things: to remove the outdated legacy commands, the obsolete directories, to make the system simple to configure, to make the development environment easily available. To provide a familiar system to Linux users/developers could make Solaris much more competitive from my perspective.

Several issues were raised during the meeting:
1. How to prevent fragmentation for OpenSolaris community? Different kinds of fragmentations exist in the history, BSD(FreeBSD/OpenBSD...), Linux(RH/Ubuntu/Novell...), Ubuntu(desktop/education...). The answer to this is that the repository of the image packaging system will be the source for all the distros to derive from. Solaris ON(OS and Network) and a set of core functions will be a must for distros to make sure binary compatibility. Within this limitation, fragmentation could be a benign thing for the community development. But this could still be a problem to pay attention to in future development.

2. Solaris has a strong backward compatibility guaranty. How will Indiana address this issue? The discussion was around whether it's important for attracting customers to have the backward compatibility. It's mentioned that Indiana only keep partly backward compatibility. Actually, the key idea is that different areas have different backward compatibility requirement. For example, I don't think it's so necessary for us to put a strong backward compatibility requirement to the desktop applications. But for Solaris ON, this is still important. This kind of loose statement could make the Solaris a more fashion look, especially for desktop environment.

3. Time to market. This is more about the release schedule I think. Currently, Solaris has a long development cycle. Solaris 10 is quite old(but stable), especially for developers. Indiana could provide a release vehicle to host all the latest features/applications. By a 6 months release schedule, it can shorten the time to market and also help collect some customers' feedback in a timely way. Then our development could benefit from this as well. A win/win situation.

The aboves are almost all the contents for the first day. It's quite helpful for me to know about these. Solaris is competitive to compare with Linux/Mac/Windows from my point of view, as a developer. It has so many features that the other systems don't have. Just like DTrace can help Mozilla in my previous posts, the other open source communities can also benefit from it. All the changes Indiana will bring to us are the key points for Solaris adoption. And I truly hope that it can be available ASAP and I can then recommend it to some other guys around, realistically or virtualizedly.

The party at night was also wonderful. Emily recommended me to have some Guinness. My impression is it's so different:-) Jack is funny. It's cold outside, but warm when close to the heater. The toast is short. I believe that we could have more toast when Indiana is available.

BTW, why is the code name Indiana? Is it because that Ian lives in Indiana?

As I've mentioned in the previous post, the OpenSolaris developers summit was held in a beautiful city along the sea -- Santa Cruz, Oct. 13 to Oct. 14. I'm really lucky to be there because it's the first time that OpenSolaris community organized this event. It seems that there were some kind of pressures/doubts around before the beginning of the summit. But I want to say: The summit is a big success. It brought the happiness memory of the Firefox summit 2006 back to my mind. This is just what I feel an open source community should be, to connect people in an easy atmosphere.

However, nothing is perfect, even the weather became an obstacle for this event. Big rain stroke San Francisco at the eve of the summit. Traffic accidents happened on both sides of the high way. One telegraph pole was down because of the rain on our way to Santa Cruz. But we still showed up in the reception session at the bar, just a little bit late. Brendan Gregg was there too, and it's so nice that Mozilla DTrace was landed in Mozilla source tree finally, including the Mozilla DTrace framework and also the Javascript probes: 1 2 3. Nice to talk with the guys there, no matter whether I know their names or not. Anybody know why Ben always wear skirt? Because he is just so strong? One thing I had to mention is that the hotel is great. The big glass door faces the sea directly. We can watch the sunrise by just sitting in the balcony. It's really fantastic:-) There seems to be a pleasure ground along the sea, only open at night. A wharf goes to the mid of the sea. It provides a place for the seabirds to take a rest, some sea lions sleep down there at night, also for people to do fishing there.

University of California, Santa Cruz is another branch for UC, just like UC Berkeley, UCLA. It's located on the mountain area, seems to be the northwest part of Santa Cruz, with trees surrounding different buildings and some deers wandering on the road. The temperature is low in the morning and evening. I had to stand close to the heater at that time. But when sun goes up and shines in the sky. We could feel the warm immediately. Baskin Engineering 2 building is the place where we had the summit.

One thing amazing to me is that so many people in the states live in the mountain area, and stay far from each other. At the same time, they could enjoy the life with the supply of transportation(self own car), power, water... Maybe it's just because that I've got use to the situation that people live close to each other. And this is just so different.