Day 2 at the Digital Summit. Hasn’t quite had the same fizz as yesterday morning, but enjoyable nonetheless. Didn’t think Cullen was half as good as Cunliffe. As usual, there’s some random babbling notes from today too.
I’m attending the Digital Future Summit up in Auckland today and tomorrow. While not quite as interactive as I’d like (and seriously, there’s a lot of paper materials for a digital summit), it’s been a pretty fascinating set of speakers. I’ve been uploading a set of random babbling notes from time to time.
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).
One of the hotly debated issues since we launched last week was around the addition of /usr/gnu/bin to the default path, along with the addition of bash as the default user shell. I’ve been a bash user for a pretty long time, and never really found that it got in the way much (especially compared to the older generation shells). I’ve never really had much of a reason to change.
This week I’ve decided to make ksh93 my default shell, downloaded and installed from Roland’s excellent snapshots. While I use the command-line pretty much every day, I certainly don’t use it extensively for scripting, and I probably mostly care about tab completion, and clearing my terminal window.
For tab completion, ksh93 lists the options by number and details the path, allowing you to choose one by a simple ‘N<tab>’ key combination –
gman@rampage:~$ z 1) /usr/bin/zipgrep 10) /usr/bin/zcat 2) /usr/bin/zsh-4.3.4 11) /usr/bin/zipcloak 3) /usr/bin/zipsplit 12) /usr/sbin/zlogin 4) /usr/bin/zipnote 13) /usr/sbin/zoneadm 5) /usr/bin/zip 14) /usr/sbin/zpool 6) /usr/bin/zsh 15) /usr/sbin/zdump 7) /usr/bin/zipinfo 16) /usr/sbin/zic 8) /usr/bin/zenity 17) /usr/sbin/zonecfg 9) /usr/bin/zonename 18) /usr/sbin/zfs
which feels pretty useful, though less useful when you type ‘gnome <tab>’ since the output is now a single column. With bash you get a similar single column output, but it is piped through more to avoid having to scroll up later. Tab completion also seems a little awkward with ksh93 if you get part of the path wrong, since it seems to add 4 spaces after you tab making it look as if the completion succeeded.
For clearing a screen, ksh93 at the moment seems a lot more irritating. The key combination is ‘<esc><ctrl>l’, whereas bash is just ‘<ctrl>l’. I’m sure the ksh93 one is doing something more, but well, gets in the way for my use.
I’ll continue for the rest of the week and see how it all works out. I do like the shnote, shtinyurl, and shtwitter scripts in /usr/demo/ksh/fun though!
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 –
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.
