Category: Work

Linux cool, Solaris hot

By now you’ve probably read the stories that Sun are ‘cooling down’ their efforts on JDS/Linux. It’s unclear exactly what that means for future Linux releases yet, at least to us lowly engineers. But what does it mean for our involvement with the GNOME community?

If anything, I actually think it’ll increase our involvement. By focusing so hard on Linux for the past couple of years, we’ve probably spent the majority of our time on things like branding and other Sun-specific features, because on the whole, the Linux versions of GNOME and the other products we ship with JDS just work. On the other hand, our approach with the Solaris version has often just been to pull out those bits that don’t work very well on Solaris– sometimes substituting them with existing Java apps, which don’t necessarily integrate as well as they could with the rest of GNOME; other times just losing the feature altogether.

By concentrating more on the Solaris version, we’ll have everyone focused on making those things work properly, not to mention letting loose our cool Solaris 10 tools (like dtrace) on improving performance. We need to make JDS work well on SunRays after all, and that can only benefit everyone.

The engineering team here really seem to be looking forward to this renewed focus… it’s almost a throwback to the days when we first got involved with GNOME, and (with the help of Ximian and Wipro) were knocking our socks off to release 2.0 on Solaris 8. Personally I think those days represent the most productive our interactions with the GNOME community over the past five years, and it culminated in one of the most stable releases of GNOME that I’ve used. Here’s hoping we can do the same again.

And you smell like one too

It’s a popular day for birthdays1 among your friendly JDS team today… Laca, our globetrotting release engineer, Robert, our engineering director, and yours truly. Have a good one everybody!

1Although of course most days are, in any modestly-sized group of people… statistics always freaked me out at school.

2That isn’t my my birthday cake, it’s Jorge‘s from a while back– just seemed like an appropriate picture…

Remote GUADEC

Feels a bit weird not going to GUADEC this year… I blame that guy that we’re sending from New Zealand for blowing the travel budget for the rest of us :) Luckily Stuttgart is the first GUADEC host city that I’ve visited before anyway, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out too much on that side of things… and hopefully I’ll be able to watch many of the talks via the live video feeds that were so successful last year.

In case any GNOME folks are worried that our low attendance this year are a sign that Sun aren’t interested in supporting GNOME any more, though, nothing could be further from the truth… we have as many GNOME/JDS projects on the go at the moment as we’ve ever had, and with OpenSolaris just around the corner I expect we’ll be ramping up even more. So actually it’s probably just as well we’re not sending so many engineers to GUADEC this year– we’re too darn busy :)

The Network is the Computer (but not everyone’s)

Working at home a day or so a week has been a great convenience, but it looks like my days are numbered… at least if I want to keep using my Mac.

The current Cisco VPN client apparently doesn’t work with OSX 10.4, so I won’t be able to connect to the office from home that way if I decide to install my shiny new upgrade when it arrives next week– and let’s face it, it’s going to be hard to resist :) Rumours abound too that the OSX version is about to be EOL’d anyway, so who knows how well it’ll ever work post-Panther.

Normally I’m running Linux on my Mac when I’m working anyway, so no problem you’d think– except there’s no PowerPC version of the Cisco VPN client, and today we’ve been told that we’re no longer allowed to use the open source vpnc client either, as a security audit has determined the current version to be too insecure.

Even if there was a way around those issues, Sun is taking SOX compliance rather seriously, and in the not too distant future, full remote access will be restricted to employees with centrally-managed workstations running Java Desktop System, with a Java card reader for authentication. If you think this sounds a lot like SunRay@Home, you’d probably be right :) The rest of us will be restricted to accessing so-called ‘edge services’ like mail and calendar from our evil non-JDS boxes.

While SunRay is one of the coolest technologies going, and being able to control who does what with your infrastructure is a must, I’m not convinced that everyone who currently works at home is going to be well-served by this one-size-fits-all approach, or that the world is going to be a safer place as a result. It’s a perfect solution for VPs, managers and salesfolk, who have a SunRay on their desk whose session they can then tap into wherever they go. But I fear that engineers (and Sun does have the odd one or two, so I’m told) with their three or four standalone workstations per desk, and designers with the need for something a little more powerful than GIMP and StarOffice Draw, are going to find it a lot harder to get their job done in the comfort of their own home.

But there’s a way to go before all that happens, and I live in hope… Sun prides itself on the number of its employees who have the opportunity to work remotely. If anyone can find a way to securely connect together a bunch of differently-flavoured *nix machines1 across the internet without limiting their functionality to that of an internet café, you would think it might be us :)

1Ignoring the fact that some folk will probably want to connect Windows machines as well, but since they represent the largest part of the problem, I’d have no issue with them being banned from connecting remotely at all…

You’ve got mail… but only for 400 days

So, Sun are going to start making us archive any emails over 400 days old that we want to keep, and everything else will be automatically deleted. According to an Evolution vfolder I just set up for the job, I currently have 23,206 emails older than that, each of which I’ll need to decide whether to archive or not. Think I’m going to have a fun few weekends :)

It’s not ‘kay’, m-kay?

Apparently, Scott McNealy pronounced my name ‘Kay-lum’ in his latest
monthly intranet broadcast (as Americans are wont to do for some
reason… especially those who live in Kay-lifornia).  I know this
because everyone keeps coming up to me today and saying “Hello
Kaylum”.  It’s really not that funny any more :)

New home for JDS community RPMs

Dave Southern will now be maintaining his unofficial JDS RPM repository over at Ricardo Wagemaker’s gcclinux.com
site. You’ll find a large number of useful apps for JDS R2
there, with JDS R3 RPMs ready to go as soon as we get around to
shipping it :)

Sam and Tom on JDS R3

Sam
and Tom seemingly aren’t too enamoured with the forthcoming
release of JDS release 3 on Linux.  While they’ve given us a lot
of support in the past, I’d have to take issue with some of their
comments about the beta versions they were given access to (not least
that I was under the impression that our beta participants were subject
to an NDA and shouldn’t be commenting on it publicly yet at all, but perhaps
I’m wrong there).

They don’t get any credit for their real contributions to very
important open source projects because they don’t have any people who
actually understand or talk to individuals in the open source
community,” Hiser said. “They’re not spending any time on the mailing
lists.”

Not
quite sure which projects they’re talking about here; Googling for
sun.com
addresses on the GNOME mailing lists alone turns up 65,000
hits, and that’s without counting contributions to OpenOffice.org,
Mozilla, Evolution, X.org… if they mean “we don’t have many Linux
kernel hackers” then no, we don’t, any more than Red Hat or Novell have
many Solaris kernel hackers, despite their offering products that are interoperable with (and in some cases run on) Solaris.

[But] the people they have now who rendered JDS release three have
done a terrible job. I think they’re going to find out that it’s not
going to do well at all.

What
they’re referring to here is the theme that shipped with JDS R3 on
Solaris
10, which was also the default theme in our Linux beta release. 
While I haven’t heard many Solaris users complaining about it, there’s
no doubt that it wasn’t to everyone’s taste in the Linux beta. 
Just for the record, since it’s not mentioned in the interview, beta
customers were
given an update that reverted it to the JDS R2 look and feel while we
refine the JDS R3 one to take account of their comments.

The Linux model is to give away the software and sell services,”
Adelstein added. “They’re going to give away the software, but they
don’t have any services to sell.

I was under the impression that Sun was selling support– a service that leads most enterprises to choose to buy their
*nix systems in the first place, rather than rolling their own.

Anyway…
time will tell who’s right and who’s wrong.  Look out for the Linux version of JDS R3 in
the next couple of months and make up your own mind :)