Life is so good, it gets better every day

Joe mailed me a couple of days ago saying that he’s hiring about 10 engineers for desktop sustaining in Bangalore (and, no doubt, time to do development if the queues are low). If you’re interested, drop him a mail with your resume!

Just got to FOSS.in this morning to join in the fun during the OpenSolaris and GNOME project days there. Everyone’s pumped up about the conference and you can hear the din of people’s horns acknowledging that right across town. It promises to be a pretty excellent conference. I’m giving a talk this morning on The Secret diary of an OpenSolaris Hacker, aged 13 and 3/4 at 10am. I’ll be stepping through some of the development processes involved in contributing to the project, and helping explain how you can raise your profile in the community based on your contributions. Come join us!

Quim: There’s critique and there’s personal attacks - it’s a very, very fine line that we all need to be aware of. Calling Jeff a “psychotic failure”, “erratic fool” or “paranoid psycho” is anything but constructive, and in all honesty, pretty laughable given Jeff’s involvement within GNOME over the years and the contributions he’s made. Jeff’s a very close personal friend, has been nothing other than inspirational and supportive to me during my career, and I respect him highly to be a good visionary for the project. Sorry Murray, but I strongly disagree with you, and I’m disappointed that todays commentary on Planet GNOME has taken away from the positivity of the election campaign and those standing to help out in the running of the GNOME Foundation (let alone the people who are watching from outside the community).

Today we released the first milestone for Project Indiana, the OpenSolaris Developer Preview. Before you even read the rest of this blog entry, start your download. The locals of Guam (the last known inhabitable place in the planet to see the final hours of October pass by) are now celebrating, hopefully with some strong alcohol.

I’d like to shout out some “thank yous” right off the bat. Thanks to everyone involved in the various projects that made up this distribution, not just those on opensolaris.org but the wider free and open source community - you guys are my heros, and I strongly value your continued commitment to freedom. I’d also like to thank those projects a little closer to home that we’ve focused on for this first release, caiman, ips, and modernization (and those behind the scenes herding them - Bill, Dan, Kelly & Bonnie). They’ve survived network outages, fires *and* earthquakes to get this out the door on time - awesome! At a personal level I’d like to particularly thank David, Stephen, Dave, Danek, Sanjay and Bart for their continued patience in answering my many questions. And finally, I’d like to thank my wonderful, wonderful team mates Sara, Patrick, Jesse, Derek, Jim, Terri, and most of all Ian. We got there, woo!

Enough of the oscars, show me the software!

The developer preview is only x86 at this time (for sheer practical reasons of wanting to get something out of the door), and should run on a minimum memory requirement of 512Mb on the metal, but also in VMWare. You’ll also notice when you start playing with it -

• It is a single CD download, so much of the software you’d expect to see in Solaris Express is not there, some of which will be available from a network package repository
• It’s built on Nevada b75a
• It is also a LiveCD, allowing you to try before you install on to your disk
• Contains the latest bits of the new Caiman installer, with a significantly improved user experience
• ZFS as default filesystem - NO WAY! WAY
• IPS as the underlying network based package management system (though SVR4 packaging is still available)
• /usr/gnu/bin has been added to the default path
• bash is the default shell
• GNOME 2.20 goodies

This first release is a prototype - some indication that we really are serious about putting this together. It has come out of the proverbial sausage factory with relatively little testing and could contain bugs that could lead to panics, data corruption or other similarly uncomfortable situations. You should probably not run this in your data center.

Download it, try it, but most importantly, tell us about it! As always, we need your help - join us on indiana-discuss (or one of the other specific project aliases). We’re not done, we’re just getting started.