Indiana Update
September 21, 2007 1:10 pm Indiana, OpenSolaris, SunWith 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...
September 21st, 2007 at 2:17 pm
good news. but i fail to see the java runtime environment in the updated package list. it is a shame, because JRE is like 10MB and Sun’s possibly most important product..
September 21st, 2007 at 2:50 pm
The JRE is still under investigation. One of the design goals of the packages is to make sure they are 100% re-distributable. Currently that is not the case for the JRE because it has a dependency on a non-redistributable version of Motif. If that gets changed, for example, to GTK+ it should be possible to include it.
September 21st, 2007 at 5:23 pm
[…] Life is so good, it gets better every day » Blog Archive » Indiana Update everything you needed to know about the state of Indiana (note the small s) (tags: projectindiana solaris opensolaris opensource glynnfoster sun) […]
September 22nd, 2007 at 4:13 am
I wrote about an OSS conference held last October in Indianapolis. See Licensing and Policy Summit for Software Sharing in Higher Education: Trip Report.
There’s an important conference coming up in Indianapolis in early October, the first national gathering of educators and open-source folks. See First K-12 Open Minds Conference October 9-11 2007 in Indianapolis, Indiana.
thanks,
dave
September 22nd, 2007 at 8:15 am
Motif toolkit went away in jdk7 (see 6463431)..
Dmitri
September 22nd, 2007 at 6:18 pm
[…] Life is so good, it gets better every day » Blog Archive » Indiana Update There is also an important conference coming in Indianapolis in early October, the first national gathering of educators and open-source, http://www.centerdigitaled.com/conference.php?confid=378 I’ll be there. (tags: open-source education ubuntu linux open-standards via:sogrady) […]
September 27th, 2007 at 4:38 am
> The JRE is still under investigation. One of the design goals of the packages is to make sure they are 100% re-distributable.
We made a fully bootstrappable and redistributable version of the JRE available that only depends on Free Software:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/
It is based on OpenJDK with the binary blobs replaced with code from GNU Classpath and a patched build system so that you can use gcj to build it all from scratch.
October 2nd, 2007 at 1:49 am
I am the initiator of what now has become “Project FOX”>
I have ported Xorg’s bus scanning and (former) Linux-only drivers to Solaris_sparc.
And yet I only come in 3rd place???
Adding a few client programs or libs to Alan’s framework of Makefiles only takes a few hours.
If you don’t believe me, ask for exact details.
Apparently it is not worth doing anything difficult at low level. The credits and all the praise will always go towards what is mainstream, whether much or difficult work had been involved, or not.
Thank you so much, I will leave the FOX thing, because my work, effort and investment is not being recognized.
It is a joke to compare my work with adding a few client things to Alan’s Makefiles. I have enough of how the OpenSolaris “system” treats me. I never saw a Cent. Okay. But then I would at least like to get the credits I deserve, no more, no less.
October 2nd, 2007 at 6:54 am
Martin, quite frankly, grow up. There are no 1st, 2nd or 3rd places in any of my blog entry. I was pointing out a bunch of people who have all done great work, yourself included. If you can’t see that, maybe you are better off working in another community.
October 3rd, 2007 at 8:35 am
Glynn, Moinak, Alan, all,
in my case it was simply that most people apparently thought, I would never come up to all my announcements and promises. They probably didn’t know of/about my involvement, because few people appear to be subscribed to xwin-discuss.
This combined with my previous mis-conception, you all at Sun would still be living in a land, where milk and honey flow, plus above Blog, which I had been misunderstanding during a minute of “seeing black”, made me write that message.
I clearly could have chosen a more intelligent way of telling people that I’m also working as much, as they do, too.
Well … fortunately did nobody kill me instantly, but people have given me the chance to defend myself.
Thank you,
%martin
October 3rd, 2007 at 8:52 am
Martin, don’t for a second think that people aren’t seeing your contributions for the code. Every contribution is obviously equally valuable, though it’s true, many often go unnoticed. You are doing awesome work, and while I also don’t have access to Sun’s budget, I hope those contributions would be recognized more over time. Sorry that this has been a frustrating time for you and your contributions. I don’t know what to say about that, only that you are a very obvious hero in my book.
October 3rd, 2007 at 10:32 am
Glynn, no exaggerations pls.
One could name “a hundred” others, who invest all of their spare time as well.
Plus, when starting to think about this, it is not too easy to always thank anyone for her/his contributions. We might soon end up in Stalinism then, with pictures of the contributors all over the place. Or with 98% “thank you so much” messages in the mailing lists, and less than 2% content. cu %m
October 7th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
[…] technische Details zu Indiana gibt es im Blog von Glynn Foster. Dort wird z.B. auch das Thema ZFS als Root-Filesystem und Xen angesprochen. Ebenso wird […]
October 21st, 2007 at 3:12 am
[…] technische Details zu Indiana gibt es im Blog von Glynn Foster. Dort wird z.B. auch das Thema ZFS als Root-Filesystem und Xen angesprochen. Ebenso wird […]