Life is so good, it gets better every day

Mono on Solaris

While you can get Mono from many different sources, Jedy Wang’s been looking at building it on Solaris, along with Beagle and F-Spot. He’s put up some instructions here.

That’s a Wrap

After the end of each GUADEC, there’s always a bit of a joke around with everyone saying ‘BEST GUADEC EVER’. GUADEC always manages to do better and better, year after year. New friendships are forged, new partnerships of strategic importance are created, and the project goes from strength to strength. This year was no different, and it was wonderful to see such a diverse thriving community of people attend the 7 day conference, and such spectacular corporate sponsorship of the event.

Quim has his team of amazing volunteers did an absolutely wonderful job. His organization and lead was seamless, and with the introduction of the GNOMEFIFA football match, and GNOME band, we crossed new barriers of activity and team building to make me really proud to be a part of such a project. I’ve always said that GNOME was about the people, and Luis proved this with a wonderful closing speech

I was especially excited to see the interaction from the Sun guys. In previous conferences many people out of the team have kept to themselves, and it’s been personally disappointing that they haven’t reached out and got to know people in the community. This year they all did, and I know that many of them were buzzing from the experience and I think this will make a significant difference in the future. I met a whole heap of people for the first time, yet missed out on so many more people that I didn’t get to talk to. Next year Sun needs to hand out some t-shirts.

To everyone involved, thank you for making it such a memorable event. To Nokia and Fluendo, thank you for having such wonderful parties. To Luis, keep in touch dude! To Robert, do you really have a wife to beat? To the GNOME band, [insert Bill & Ted’s Wild Stallions guitar riff]. To Quim, you are my hero and if I can ever possibly return the favour of hosting you in NZ let me know.

Rock on GNOME, rock on!. What an amazing community we have become.

GUADEC is so cool because…

I’ve said this before, but most of the GNOME guys feel like part of my family. It’s a wonderful feeling really, and it’s been really great to catch up with them all, and meet a whole heap of new people. Last night was the Fluendo beach party. It rocked and we timed it with the first annual GNOME skinny dipping event. Building a community to a whole new level…

FIFA GNOME Cup

For Bastien’s sake, I hope he does actually lead his team to victory – wouldn’t want 2 teams he supported to get knocked out….Uh, probably should have bought those shin pads after all.

ABI and GNOME

Don’t worry Murray, we’re coming back with fresh motivation to look at the issue again. I’ve already got some ABI checking scripts to make a start from and we now have some machines slotted in our racks for the job. We’ll also have Joe Kowalski back at GUADEC this year to give us his experiences dealing with ABI in Solaris over the last millenium. With no distractions [apart from beer..], I think we’ll be able to slot in some nice time for making some real progress.

Ole from Barcelona

I’ve been spending a few relatively quiet days in Barcelona right before the GUADEC storm. It’s been really great to catch up with Lyd and Edu [whom I’ve never met previously] in her luxurious Spanish house, a few miles outside the main city. Lots of really great food, some good beers, great company and an occasional dip in the pool. As a special bonus, Tim and Bob have been over here too, so we’ve had a good few trips around town getting to see the amazing sights and sounds.

Met up with Luis and Chris today for lunch [which didn’t go as well as I hoped with some wanker stealing Chris’ laptop bag], and then a trip down to the World Trade Center to catch up with the Fluendo guys. Really ramping up for GUADEC now, and looking forward to the trip down to Vilanova with Christian tomorrow. Then party, party, party! It’s your last chance to get in on the act, and this GNOME conference looks like it will be the best ever!

Tonight we have some St.Joan festival – lots of good food, beer and fireworks. My sis has really nailed this Spanish thing.

LIVE across Australia!

Now this is more like it – reasonably priced internet plans for in-flight boredom. Hooray for Singapore Airlines, I salut you! The connection isn’t too bad either – I wonder if Sun have a corporate account on this thing??

The First Birthday

OpenSolaris is officially one year old today. Jim did an excellent review of the year, and some stunning results. During that year, I’ve had some personal highlights – JDS being the first non-ON consolidation to release their code, and the many new people I’ve had the pleasure of working with in the community.

Despite all those wonderful metrics, we’re still a growing community. We still have a lot of source code behind closed doors. The community contributions are still being bootstrapped by a relatively small set of people. We still don’t have our code in a source code management system. We’re still a little way off from a governance model. There’s still a lot of people in Sun that don’t quite grok working in an open source community.

But hell, there’s a lot of one year olds that can barely walk or articulate, and for an evolving open source community, OpenSolaris is doing just peachy. Happy birthday dude.

OpenSolaris at OSCON

I’m going to be there, who else? Looks like we’ll have a BoF there, I’ve volunteered myself for a stint in the Sun booth, and there’s bound to be a round or two of beers there. Give me a shout if you’re intending to come so I know who to look out for!

Work Update

It’s been mostly uneventful at work over the last couple of weeks. I’ve been helping to make sure that GNOME 2.14 goes through ARC ok, along along with great help from Brian and Irene. It went pretty smoothly, and apart from having to ARC a few bits separately, we’re still on track.

So on track, that in fact the next Solaris Express release you’ll install [if that’s your thing], you’ll see a new 2.14 based desktop. Packages have been built, and they’re somewhere on a server in Sun just itching to get into the Solaris Nevada WOS [wads of stuff]. It’ll almost certainly give you the willies though – the quality is pretty good, though we didn’t do as much QA as I would have hoped for a first integration build, but there’s a lot of change – it’s 2 years of community development, and we’ve got a pretty attractive non purple theme. We haven’t moved much from vanilla GNOME, by design, and hopefully people will be pleased with the result [if you can suffer the occasional bug].

Course, if you have a spare T2000, you could try running Ubuntu on it.

Otherwise, really looking forward to my trip to GUADEC this year – apart from having to present, it’ll be a good opportunity to catch up with my GNOME friends, and spend a couple of days with my sister who’s living in Barcelona. Then a short stop home to Ireland for a week, back to NZ for a couple weeks boarding, over to OSCON, and then down to HQ for a couple of days. Nothing that I could ever consider ‘work’.