Monday May 05, 2008
Quick note to anyone who, like me, is a fan of Creative's MuVo line of mp3 players.
As of Solaris Nevada b88, my v100 mounts without having to open a terminal :)
Not sure about the other models, but this one follows the same design of the earlier ones.
My first one was a USB 1.0 with 128Mb of space - incredible how little that sounds now.
I haven't followed the putback logs for 88 that closely, but I'd guess 6682222 was the one.
Monday Apr 28, 2008
So this year's FISL program appeared to be centered around community, web and scripting languages. On the first day I saw Josh Berkus' talk on database security. Which was very good, he's a great speaker and the subject is always an interesting one.
I had a presentation on OpenSolaris Testing on the second day, filling in for Jim Walker who couldn't make it to the event. I translated Jim's slide deck to BR-Pt and added a couple of pages introducing OpenSolaris, as I felt a good part of the audience would be new to the project.
The talk went smoothly, I started by asking how many people knew about OpenSolaris and got mixed responses. So I went on to talk about the basics of the project and the features that set it a part from other OS'es, the structure of the community and opensolaris.org, and the distributions (thanks to Thirtankar Das for the distro slide).
I talked about the Testing Community, TET, STF, the source browser and got to the demo part. Fortunately, the network connection came up just when I started to show the Self-Service Testing project and, a few slides later, the Test-Farm. People seemed interested in the infra-structure and how simple it is to submit a test run. Got a few questions about the automation software and the findleaks test afterwards.
Josh Berkus' 'Safe Data is Happy Data' | 
myself on OpenSolaris Testing | 
Theodore Ts'o's EXT4 Talk |
Later on the same day I attended Theodore Ts'o's talk on the Linux kernel. It turned out to be a very informal Q&A, giving an opportunity to get his opinion on OpenSolaris. I didn't want to turn the thing into OpenSolaris at all, so I waited half way through the questions and asked him his opinion on the OpenSolaris Project and technologies like DTrace and ZFS. He gave a neutral and somewhat political answer with interesting considerations. Yesterday I found out that he recently expressed some critics about the project on his blog, which was in part responsible for a very interesting conversation on the OpenSolaris Advocacy alias over the last couple of days.
On the last day I attended another talk by Ts'o on the EXT4 file system, which IIRC will emerge early next year. I'm far from an EXT# expert, but I had the impression that it is mainly a follow up to EXT3 that extends bit depth ona few key fields. None of the new features drew my attention - maybe lazy write backs, but that's not really new, is it (honest question) ?
Over all I wish there were more kernel and performance related talks, so I'll definitely submit a couple of presentations for next year's. I'm pretty sure there are a good amount of people interested in OS' kernels in that part of the world.
Sunday Apr 27, 2008
FISL is always a great experience, if not for the varied program of talks and speakers, then for the incredible community environment. In three days the organization gathered over 7k people to talk, discuss and learn about open source, free software and a huge array of technologies.
Following what PoA-OSUG did last year, the group was out there spreading the word about OpenSolaris to something like 4-500 people over the three days. I had different commitments during the event, so unfortunately I couldn't stay with the group for the whole thing. But I did manage to lose my voice by the end of the first day, alternating between Sun's and the group's booth :)
I eventually chose to stay with the OSUG rather than at Sun's booth because I noticed that a lot of people, usually students, were a bit shy to approach some of us. While the UG folks were constantly flooded with people asking all sorts of questions and had a more open environment.
While over there I talked to students, professors, sysadmins, developers and business folks. We demo'ed DTrace, ZFS, MDB and other basic features and functionalities of the systems. I saw around 10 laptops installing SXDE and helped with some installer and driver issues. One professor from a local private college brought over CS students to do research on Operating Systems, so we ended up beeing interviewed by 4-5 different groups. IT professionals from areas like database, web infra-structure, Java, even a couple of guys from the air force showed up.
What was also very interesting to see were new local companies with products and services based around OSS, more than I recall seeing at last year's. From the BR government (in all of its instances) to the new guys starting their business, OSS has become a big part of the society. Not only generating revenue but being used to drive social changes. Inclusion, freedom of information, education, and source of revenue were all there.
On the last day I went over to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) booth and borrowed one to try to install OpenSolaris 2008.05. Didn't get much luck as it can only boot from EXT2 or JFFS file images. The fact that we could barely get online also didn't help (since the air was saturated for most of the event), but it was worth a shot.
Looking forward to next year's. And if you need yet another reason to be there, the next one will be its 10th edition ;)
Friday Apr 25, 2008
Last week I flew over to Porto Alegre for FISL 9 and the OpenSolaris Day promoted by the PoA-OSUG, as a pre-FISL event on April 16th for the local community as well as folks who were in town for the Forum.
I was very impressed with both the organization of the OSDay and the turn out. I don't have the exact numbers but I estimate around 80 people in total attended five talks from one to six pm. The group also organized a webcast throughout the event, with a pretty good number of accesses from what I was told.
The event started with Vitorio Sassi giving an introduction to OpenSolaris, followed by Silveira Neto talking about HPC and OpenSolaris and Ricard Severo on Project Crossbow. I went on and talked about the kernel, specifically the VM and scheduling subsystems (slides here). I had to leave the event after that, but the event continued with Thirtankar Das doing a talk on Project Indiana.
Congrats to everyone involved in setting the event up, I'm extremely proud of how far PoA-OSUG has gone in its ~18 months of existance. Looking forward to the next one !
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