53 looks good

About six weeks ago, in anticipation of GNOME 2.16, I switched my desktop from an Ion window manager-based X11 environment to the JDS environment integrated with Solaris. Now, with the delivery of Build 53—not yet on the Download Centre, apparently—the wait is over:

A few keyboard shortcuts input, a tweak of the window preferences, and it's back to normal work. (Or better: using evince and gnome-terminal in their full screen modes are distinct improvements for reading documents onscreen.)

Background image by Mandolux.

[ T: OpenSolaris Solaris JDS GNOME ]

Tip: Mercurial atop ssh

On opensolaris.org, we host Mercurial and Subversion via their ability to tunnel through an SSH connection. A slight gotcha with Mercurial is that it turns off compression when tunnelled through SSH, as described in hg(1):

$ man hg
....
    - Mercurial doesn't use its own compression via SSH; the right thing
      to do is to configure it in your ~/.ssh/ssh_config, e.g.:
        Host *.mylocalnetwork.example.com
          Compression off
        Host *
          Compression on
    
      Alternatively specify "ssh -C" as your ssh command in your hgrc or
      with the --ssh command line option.
....

For pulls of a large repository, such as ON, compression changes an approximately 51 minute operation to a 17 minute operation. So you'll want something like

$ cat ~/.ssh/config
....
Host hg.opensolaris.org
    Compression yes
    ...
....

[ T: OpenSolaris Solaris Mercurial hg ]

OpenSolaris: Documentation tutorial buffet

Each of the community groups that make up OpenSolaris is experimenting with different styles of introductory materials (or procedures), so that potential contributors don't get blocked on the details and can focus on their real intention—contributions. The Documentation community group has been energetically pursuing a complete offering: they have a large document tree, they're using a "scratchpad" on the Genunix wiki, and they have at least one mailing list. They even have a Flash animated tutorial, illustrating how to use a DocBook XML toolchain. Slick.

[ T: OpenSolaris Solaris documentation DocBook ]

OpenSolaris Day, Buenos Aires

I've been back from Buenos Aires for a week now, and just wanted to comment on my trip, and show the few pictures I managed to take. Like its sister events, Buenos Aires TechDays was a densely packed three day conference, with multiple tracks available on OpenSolaris, Java, NetBeans, SunStudio, Glassfish, and other technologies and platforms. I updated the "Building and Deploying OpenSolaris" talk, to cover the convenient Starter Kit, which has the tools and source (and OS images) and to mention the ONNV Mercurial repository on opensolaris.org.

The talk was simultaneously translated into Spanish, using some slick IR emitter arrays and receivers. Russ, I think, was much more effective, as he gave his presentations in Spanish.

The event was held at the Hilton Buenos Aires, which is located in the recently redeveloped Puerto Madero area. When Teresa and I walked around on the first day, we saw activity in the harbour, and paused to watch (along with a few hundred other pedestrians), as this tugboat

helped this coast guard ship

turn out of the relatively narrow channel.

Back at TechDays, we enjoyed the chance to have further technical discussions, with many resolutions

to study new problems, reengage with old ones, or just return to Argentina.

The Inquirer's Fernando Cassia has more on the NetBeans portion of the event.

In Argentina, but missed TechDays? There's an OpenSolaris user group—check it out.

[ T: Solaris OpenSolaris TechDays Buenos_Aires ]