Woke up this morning and saw two mails from Alan about open sourcing the portal that runs opensolaris.org – that is so unbelievably rocking. Congrats Alan!
(Did anyone else notice the uncanny timing between when the sources were released and when Steve Lau left the building?)
Jayne had a pretty long (and awesome) day at her workshop, enough to warrant opening one of our Martinborough wines. One turned to two, obviously, and this evening’s selection has been a Vynfield Riesling 2006 and a Tulicher Chardonnay 2004. Nothing beats wine for relaxing on the couch, chilling your bones.
While I’m still more or less trying to find my feet in the marketing organization, the occasional distraction is always fun. Spent 20 minutes yesterday with Dan, finding a few leaks in GNOME. Dan navigated libumem and mdb and both of us navigated the code. Helped save many megabytes of heap in the panel. Yay! Lots of low hanging fruit for a pretty noticeable gain right across the desktop, and libumem (like valgrind I imagine) makes this heaps easier. Thanks Dan!
I hadn’t picked up on this before, but if you’re interested in seeing Dave Miner’s (and others) work towards a Slim Install prototype for Indiana, here’s a link to the Mercurial repository –
hg clone ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/caiman/slim_prototype
1 can of Black Rock Miner’s Stout, 1kg of Irish Stout #74 Converter, 1 bag of Golding hops and a vanilla pod – all mixed together with some yeast, and the fermentation has begun. Original gravity of 1041. Think I need to invest in some muslin because the sieve I used was probably not quite fine enough. Looking forward to trying this one out, should be a hoot.
We’re having a Spag Bol cook-off in the flat today. It’s a pretty heated competition and there is a huge amount of ability, ingredients and taste being talked up. We’re just over one hour into it, and my sauce is safely down to slowly simmer away for the next couple of hours. I went out on a huge limb by selecting some wild pork mince, which seems to be overpowering the rest of the flavours. I’ve also taken the punt not to spend the last couple of months practicing when the flat is empty. My ingredients in order of being added are – butter, celery, red onion, carrot, milk, wild pork mince, pancetta, tomato paste, garlic, bay leaf, nutmeg, de-skinned and seeded tomatoes, italian chianti, fresh basil, sun dried tomatoes, salt, pepper, fresh buffalo mozzarella and fresh basil garnish. Who knows who’ll win, but it’s been a fun time so far.
Bought ingredients to put down a batch of Irish stout this weekend. Looking forward to it already!
Fresh from the NZ 2.0 list, Roger Dennis’ experiment to see how fast information travels online. 4 targets – Robert Scoble, Seth Golden, Sergey Brin and Stephen Fry (FMS = Find me S[coble, eth, ergey, tephen]). Check it out!.
With a few weeks to go to the OpenSolaris Summit, and hopefully not much longer before we get a first preview release of Indiana, I figured it would be a good time to write an update of where the project is and the great progress that has been made to date.
The Caiman folks have been tirelessly rocking away in the background making some pretty incredible progress. Dave recently posted an updated package list for the Slim Install project, which now has a prototype successfully booting at just over 500MB in size. Considering that they started from Solaris Express and 6 CDs worth of contents, this is excellent progress that Sanjay and the team have made and represents a very solid foundation to tweak over the coming months. David is doing a similarly awesome job identifying lists of components for a first pass at an eventual network repository. Jan posted a first draft of the target instantiation spec for Slim Install, with a focus on ZFS being the root file system initially.
Karen recently announced the source code repository of the Distribution Constructor project, based on much of the work that Dave has done with the Live Media project, and Moinak’s (and team) work on BeleniX. It’s pretty nice to see this all coming together, and I very much hope that it will be similar to Revisor in functionality. You can check out the current scripts here –
hg clone ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/caiman/distro_constructor
Ethan is starting to ramp up the Snap Upgrade project, with his strawman proposal for management of the boot environment, and has outlined a schedule for the work. Awesome!
And of course work is continuing on the rest of the install infrastructure after the successful integration of the Dwarf Caiman thanks to Sarah and a heap of others (William, Sundar, Niall, Matt, Jedy, Frank) - despite the occasional hiccup from the cheap seats of the audience (no offense Eric!) :)
Stephen and Danek have proposed their image packaging system project to the Install community, and got the all clear to set up a webpage, mailing list and Mercurial repository. Hopefully we'll see some good things soon on this front - until then, the Indiana package management status page has more details, including links to various related blog posts.
Alan has been rocking on providing an open X stack with the FOX project, and the work of Moinak and Martin. Not only that, he's had time to work on integrating libXcursor so we can finally all have whizzy animated cursors! Laca has been tirelessly building the desktop stack with the new X libraries, and with the release of GNOME 2.20 this week, we're in exceptionally good shape.
Great work is still being done by John on the i18n emancipation and Jason on an unencumbered libdisasm for SPARC. All of which looks good for being able to provide a freely re-distributable download (and torrent!).
There are other projects continuing to make significant strides too numerous to mention here (xVM guys, congrats!). Check them out, they could use your help.
And so our attention turns to next month's summit, as Ben points out. Brian has been doing a great job pulling some of the proposed topics together, so we're all coming prepared. There's 65 people currently signed up for the two day event (13th and 14th October), and it will be an excellent opportunity to meet the people behind the project and brainstorm of the coming months.
You can be 66!
Update:Okay, Simon grabbed 66. You can be 67! You get the idea...
Pretty gutted to see Steve is leaving Sun. I’ll miss the guy a lot, and I’ve enjoyed working with him in Sun over the past couple of years. Best of luck dude in your new nest! They’ve hired a pretty awesome guy, and I’m sure you’re going to have a lot of fun there.
The Summer of Code for 2007 has finished. All in all it was a pretty successful summer, although only 2 of the 4 students completed the program to the end. John did some excellent work on re-writing the encumbered internationalization code, and looks in great shape for integration in the near future. Tom did a fantastic job with porting Mlucas to the Solaris platform, and is now record holding on OpenSolaris/Sparc64 VI. I think everyone involved in the program, both mentors and students, learned heaps and I hope it was valuable to them. From an OpenSolaris point of view, we still have a bit of work to do both in identifying well defined projects with well planned steps to completion for next years participation, and continuing to reduce the bar for new people getting involved. Thanks heaps to Google for selecting us and to everyone involved this year – it continues, in my opinion, to be a very important indicator for where we are in terms of community building, and I’m looking forward to Rob Giltrap taking over the administration reigns for next year.
