rv's techblog: some kind of blog

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.

Esta semana foi criado o planet.opensolaris.org Brasileiro, um portal agregador de feeds de blogs da comunidade brasileira de OpenSolaris. Assim como o planet.opensolaris.org internacional, este portal vai ajudar a divulgar noticias, promover eventos, tutoriais, conteudo e varios tipos de informacoes para usuarios (e desenvolvedores) de OpenSolaris no Brasil.

I've always liked having multiple windows open at once, or the ability to view and edit different files without having to switch windows or workspaces. This preference was amplified to a need once I started reading the OpenSolaris code. I've been using jEdit for years now, mainly because it allows you to split as many screens as you want, but also because of the various plugins you can find for it. It's also a good excuse to keep my Java from getting too rusted, tho you only need it if you're looking at the source. Here's a snapshot of my usual coding environment:

Hopefully I didn't shrink the image too much, but you should be able to see the tabbed editor and a big drop down box at the top to switch between projects. Both the tabbed view and the project features are plugins. I used to resize the window across a dual head setup when I had two monitors, having 10+ simultaneous views of different files speeds things up very nicely. Another cool feature is that you can have N views of the same file.

I also tend to have several Firefox instances open, and used to resize these to fit in one workspace. But yesterday I ran into the Split Browser add-on. It's been around for a while, so no big news here. It certainly can be improved, but it's been saving me lots of time lately. Check it out.

Let me know if you know of a good editor/browser/.. with split view-like features. Always interested in it.

OpenSolaris no Brasil? Claro !

A comunidade tem crescido muito nos últimos meses, principalmente com o lançamento do OpenSolaris 2008.11. Se você esta procurando um grupo de usuários na sua região, de uma conferida na lista abaixo (mantida no br.opensolaris.org)

• Lista Nacional de OpenSolaris
  inscreva-se !

• Grupo de Usuários de OpenSolaris de Porto Alegre (PoA-OSUG)
  lista de discussão
  website

• Grupo de Usuários de OpenSolaris de São Paulo (SAMPA-OSUG)
  lista de discussão
  website

• Grupo de Usuários de OpenSolaris do Noroeste São Paulo (NOR-OSUG)
  lista de discussão
  website

• Grupo de Usuários de OpenSolaris de Belem (GU-OSUG)
  lista de discussão
  website

• Comunidade de OpenSolaris da USP-São Carlos
  website

• Grupo de Usuários de OpenSolaris de Petrópolis, RJ
  website

• OpenSolaris User Group de Brasília
  website

• Grupo de Usuários de OpenSolaris da UNICAMP
  lista de discussão
  website

• Grupo de Usuários de OpenSolaris da UFRJ
  lista de discussão
  website

• Grupo de Usuários de OpenSolaris da Bahia
  lista de discussão
  fórum

Se você tem interesse em criar um grupo de usuários na sua cidade ou região, visite esta pagina no grupo de Advocacy do opensolaris.org. Ao final da pagina, você encontra informações sobre o que e necessário para criar um grupo. Se tiver duvidas, entre em uma das listas acima e pergunte ;)