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Indiana Update

September 21, 2007 Indiana, OpenSolaris, Sun 14 Comments

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...

Summer of Code Wrap-up

September 17, 2007 OpenSolaris 4 Comments

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.

The Indiana Branding Machine

September 13, 2007 Indiana, OpenSolaris 2 Comments

As our first prototype releases draws nearer, it’s time to start thinking about the branding experience for Indiana, specifically from when they put the LiveCD into their CDROM drives and launch the desktop to installing it on their disk. From my perspective, it’s an incredible opportunity to promote the OpenSolaris community brand, and create a sense of pride of ownership of the product (and technology) that we’ve taken part in. I’ve started a discussion on the Indiana mailing list – if you have some ideas of where we should focus, and what content we might want to highlight get involved! It would be great to be able to identify a solid list to work from for an eventual first release in Spring next year.

OpenSolaris Developer Summit

August 27, 2007 General, OpenSolaris, Sun 1 Comment

The first OpenSolaris Developer Summit has been announced for the weekend of 13th and 14th October at the University of California in Santa Cruz. It’ll be a pretty hands on summit, with a lot of discussion (hopefully) around putting together the bits of Indiana. It’ll also be a good excuse to party and get to know some faces behind the OpenSolaris project which I’m looking forward to – I’ve found with previous GNOME experiences, it’s the best way to get excited about where we’re heading for the project and putting a face to a name really helps communication wise too.

We haven’t yet got a solid schedule around, but there’s a mailing list set up and ready for discussion. We also have a small amount of travel sponsorships for non-Sun employees to be able to attend, so if you think you’d like to attend and have been active in the project thus far, please do apply. So go register! (oh, and save the world by car pooling down to the event if you can).