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Re-thinking the Media Kit

February 26, 2008 1:06 pm gman Indiana, OpenSolaris, Sun

Over the last couple of days or so, I’ve started to think about the media kits a little more, particularly with respect to get.opensolaris.org for the OpenSolaris release, but also in terms of being able to create derivations targeting specific sets of our potential user base. As I see it, I think it should be possible to create a generic framework that would allow us to swap in and out components, depending on that focus – with the addition of more CD’s depending on the focus.

As such you could think about a number of standalone ‘modules’ –

• OpenSolaris LiveCD ISO image
  This is the standard image that has been part of the OpenSolaris Developer Preview series, providing the user a LiveCD image, with an opportunity to demo it before they install it to their system. This will track the standard ISO images produced as part of Project Indiana, complete with IPS should they wish to download and install additional software from the network package repositories
• OpenSolaris Source Code
  With the very real limitations of network bandwidth across the world, most notably in emerging communities such as India, China and many parts of Africa, it is absolutely vital for people to have easy access to the source code. This module will provide source code to the various consolidations working out on opensolaris.org as a checked out repository (either Mercurial or Subversion), allowing the user to pull updates from the network or browse off-line. Additionally with a simple set of scripts provided, it will provide an opportunity for those running the OpenSolaris distribution to run an OpenGrok instance and allow full searching on the local source code. This could also be useful in a classroom environment, where network access is limited.
• User Documentation
  This module will provide all the user documentation for running the OpenSolaris distribution, complete with a number of tutorials or other guides.
• Developer
  
  In the developer section, it will provide a set of simple tools and applications to develop on OpenSolaris, both for the OpenSolaris community itself and also in the wider developer community.
  • OpenSolaris Community
    • Mercurial, SVN, OpenGrok, ..
    • ON build tools
    • Sun Studio Compiler
  • General Developer Community
    • Netbeans
    • Sun Studio Compiler
• Module Derivatives
  A number of variations of the Media Kit should be possible, including a tailored set of derivations of the OpenSolaris distribution. Some possibilities may include –
  • WordPress/Roller Blog Appliance
    Run an instance of the popular WordPress blogging application, with everything automatically configured out of the box, including a web server.
  • Ruby on Rails Web Developer
    Provide a running web server with DTrace enabled Ruby, Firefox and Apache server.
  • HPC Research
    Provide a set of developer tools to monitor performance and throughput for highly parallel tasks.
  • Others Appliances
    Are there other specific appliances we could be doing?
  • Xen Client
    Automatic Xen client configured out of the box.
  • Community Participant
    Provide an out of the box OS that could be installed to automatically mirror sources/binaries or whatever to another part of the world, helping the global distribution of OpenSolaris.

Let me know what you think!