rv's techblog: some kind of blog

A organização do FISL 10 começou a anunciar as palestras da próxima edição. Pra quem não conhece, FISL é o Fórum Internacional de Software Livre. Acontece todo ano em Porto Alegre, geralmente em abril, mas uns dois meses mais tarde este ano. É o maior evento de FOSS na América Latina, terceiro no mundo, até onde eu saiba.

Eu havia inscrito quatro palestras: duas sobre DTrace (nas trilhas de administração de sistemas e de ferramentas de desenvolvimento), uma sobre OpenSolaris chamada 'OpenSolaris em 45 Minutos', uma versão atualizada da palestra que fiz no Ontario Linux Fest ano passado (incrível que ja se passaram oito meses), e uma sobre o escalonador, que foi a aceita. O FISL é conhecido por não aceitar mais de uma palestra por palestrante, com algumas excessões.

Apesar de estar muito contente com a seleção desta palestra, confesso que esperava ter uma das palestras sobre DTrace selecionadas, ja que é um assunto mais recente/novo/atual. DTrace não é muito difundido no Brasil, nos ainda temos que superar alguns problemas básicos de adoção, talvez isso explique. Mas tendo usado DTrace diariamente nos últimos dois anos, é difícil imaginar pessoas desenvolvendo e gerenciando seus sistemas sem. Talvez esteja faltando perspectiva da minha parte, mas gostaria de demonstrar DTrace para uma audiência maior no Brasil - o que vai acontecer de qualquer jeito durante o Fórum, junto a parte reservada aos grupos de usuários, um pequeno grupo de pessoas de cada vez como sempre acontece.

Outra coisa interessante foi que todas as quatro propostas receberam comentários positivos dos avaliadores. O que novamente prova que as pessoas estão abertas ao OpenSolaris como uma alternativa a outros sistemas operacionais. Mas a taxa atual de crescimento e de atividades mostra que não estamos tirando proveito disto. Pensando sobre esse problema, a unica solução que encontro é conhecimento. Acho que a comunidade deve promover mais eventos técnicos no Brasil, assim como o Front Range OSUG nos EUA, ou o Tokyo OSUG, ou outros grupos mais ativos sobre os quais sempre lemos. Acredito que disseminar conhecimento é a melhor maneira de crescer nossa comunidade.

Para isso, o Porto Alegre OSUG realizara um Workshop de DTrace no dia primeiro de Junho, para o lançamento do OpenSolaris 2009.06. Como uma maneira também de prepararmos o grupo para o FISL. Também teremos outros eventos ao longo do mês, incluindo um OpenSolaris Tour na semana do Fórum.

De qualquer maneira, se você estiver planejando participar do FISL esse ano, apareça na stand do Grupo de Usuários de OpenSolaris de Porto Alegre. Não vai ser difícil nos encontrar.

The FISL 10 committee started announcing the list of talks that were accepted for this year's Forum. For those who never heard of it, FISL is the International Free Software Forum. Takes place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, every year usually at the end of April, moved up a couple of months this year. It's the biggest FOSS event in Latin America, third in the world last I heard.

I submitted four talks: two on DTrace (for the sysadmin and developer tools tracks), one on OpenSolaris called 'OpenSolaris in 45 Minutes', which is an updated version of the talk I have at the Ontario Linux Fest last year (can't believe it's been almost eight months already), and one on the scheduler, which is the one that got accepted. FISL is known for not accepting more than one talk per speaker.

Although I'm very excited about doing this talk, I was actually hoping/expecting that one of the DTrace talks would be accepted since it's a more recent/new/trendy subject. DTrace is not very well known in Brazil, we still have to overcome more basic adoption problems, maybe that explains it. But having used it on a daily basis for the last couple of years, it's hard to imagine people developing and running their systems without it. Maybe I'm lacking some perspective here, but I was hoping to be able to demonstrate DTrace to a large audience - which will happen anyway, at the floor, one small group of people at a time as it always does.

Another thing that was interesting is that all four talks got really good reviews and comments. Which again proves that people are still open to OpenSolaris as an alternative to other OSes. But the current community growth rate and activity in BR show that we are not taking advantage of that. I've been thinking about this for a good amount of time, and the only answer I can think of is knowledge. I think we as a community need to promote more technical events in Brazil, much like the Front Rage OSUG in the US, or the Tokyo OSUG, or other active OSUGs we always read about. Disseminating knowledge, I think, is the best way to grow our community.

To that end, the Porto Alegre OSUG is doing a DTrace Workshop on June 1st, for the 2009.06 launch. I think it would be much more effective if all the group members participating in FISL were fluent in DTrace, or ZFS, or Zones, .. We're also having a few other events throughout the month, as well as an OpenSolaris Tour just before FISL. Should be fun.

Anyway, if you're making your way down to FISL this year, please stop by and say hi. We'll be easy to spot.

I recently started playing with gtk on OpenSolaris and thought I'd post here the couple of packages you need to install to compile a simple gtk app. Took me a few minutes searching the web, would've been nice to get it all in one place. I'm running 2008.11 with the latest build, snv_111. Given a short piece of code using gtk, like this one from the gtk tutorial:

#include <gtk/gtk.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
	GtkWidget *window;

	gtk_init(&argc, &argv);

	window = gtk_window_new(GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL);

	gtk_widget_show(window);

	gtk_main();
	
	return 0;
}

you'll need to install SUNWgnome-common-devel (for pkg-config), SUNWxwinc and SUNWxorg-headers (for header files). So just

# pfexec pkg install SUNWgnome-common-devel SUNWxwinc SUNWxorg-headers

and then

 # cc gtk_1.c -o gtk_1 `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0`

and you're set.

Last night (PST time), the LatencyTOP project gate received the first changeset from Intel containing LatencyTOP for OpenSolaris. This tool leverages DTrace to analyze sources of latency in the system, and help developers gain a batter understanding of why their app's may be running slower than desired.

You can clone the repository with

hg clone ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/latencytop/latencytop-gate

then follow these steps to build and run:

latencytop-gate $ cp usr/src/tools/env/opensolaris.sh .

latencytop-gate $ gedit opensolaris.sh  -> edit GATE and CODEMGR_WS with the path to your workspace

latencytop-gate $ bldenv ./opensolaris.sh

latencytop-gate $ cd usr/src/tools

latencytop-gate $ dmake

latencytop-gate $ cd ../cmd/latencytop

latencytop-gate $ dmake

latencytop-gate $ i386/latencytop       -> or amd64/, sparc/ depending on your system

If you're interested in getting involved in this project, now would be a great time for that. The application itself is relatively new, and there's lots of possibilities for improving and extending its functionalities.

Here's a screenshot of LatencyTOP running on my laptop.

The tool lists system-wide and per process sources of latency. The horizontal list of process at the bottom scrolls to the left/right so you can observe a specific process.