November 9, 2008
General
2 Comments
Yesterday, David mailed the announcement of OpenSolaris 2008.11 Release Candidate 1. After a pretty monumental effort on several counts, we’re almost in the home stretch for our release at the end of this month. We’ve all come such a long way since the first release in May, and I’m really hopeful that people are going to enjoy this release – we have more packages than ever, the new projects introduced in May are more mature including some really great features, and (best of all) we’re about to produce another release on a 6 month cadence.
I’m in the final stages of putting together a ‘What’s new in 2008.11’ document, so I’ll not spoil that blog post. But go get it (continuing thanks to genunix.org for their support in hosting the developer ISOs), or image-update from an existing install and, most importantly, tell us what you think.
The engineering team have done another excellent and tireless job, as usual, but in particular I’d like to thank Comay for the fricken long hours he’s put in over the last week or two – home straight dude, home straight.
September 22, 2008
OpenSolaris, Sun
7 Comments
If you’re lucky enough to spot them and get your hands on one (they’re relatively rare, and not part of the free media program), these are the OpenSolaris Student Packs – referred to as ‘BTS’ or Back to School on the mailing lists. Essentially it’s a CD and DVD pack in a nice cardboard (printed on recycled paper with soy-based inks) case.
The CD is a re-spin of OpenSolaris 2008.05 to fix some of the bad package management bugs that were included in the May image. We’ve updated the download servers too, so you can download the ISO image from one of the increasing number of mirror sites (thank you!)
The DVD is slightly more interesting. It includes OpenOffice 2.4.1 (for Linux, Mac and Windows) and VirtualBox 1.6.4 (for Linux, Mac and Windows), though our timing on getting these printed misses out on the latest version 2.0.2 which, of course, you can download for free. But best of all, we also include Virtual Image of OpenSolaris where we’ve already downloaded some of the developer software from the network package repository (Java, Sun Studio, AMP, HPC). I like this idea a lot, because I think the virtual image (through VirtualBox or others) is becoming a better LiveCD allowing people to try out OpenSolaris with little or no commitment and enjoy some of the technology included.
I’ll send some out to the first 5 people who add a comment to this blog. Update: This is now closed, and the 7 lucky winners who managed to comment before I shut off the comments will get a student pack sent to them.
September 22, 2008
FOSS, NewZealand
1 Comment
Although I missed most of the lead up, the Unlimited Potential team (with awesome help from Brenda, Jethro, Chris, Don and others) rocked on hosting the most excellent Software Freedom Day. There was a pretty amazing turnout, as Brenda’s photos show and I think just about everyone who attended enjoyed the conversation that resulted.
The highlights for me were seeing the OpenSolaris Student Packs for the first time that I’ve been involved in over the last couple of months, a zsh(1) demo, and an excellent discussion about on NZOSS. I’ve been wanting to get more involved in NZOSS for a while, and keen to learn where I can contribute (outside a lot of the policy work they’ve already been doing). The Wellington Convention Center was a pretty great place to host the event (if a little expensive given that this sort of event boosts the visibility of the Wellington IT scene), and the Havana coffee was wonderful. Was good to catch up with Nat and Andrew over a rather spicy curry afterwards.
Thanks to all the sponsors, helpers and, in particular, my other half for making it such a rocking event!
September 4, 2008
Conference, FOSS, NewZealand
Comments Off on Software Freedom Day 08 – Wellington needs sponsors!
As time draws closer to Software Freedom Day, there’s still plenty of opportunity to register for the event.
More importantly, this event couldn’t be run without the support of sponsors. Unlimited Potential, CWA New Media, NZOSS, SuperHappyDevHouse, WellyLug, Catalyst IT and Sun have all kindly stepped forward to help in some way, but unfortunately we still need some more financial support to help run this event and provide food to our hungry barcampers and hackers! If you know of someone who would be interested, please send them my way to (glynn . foster @ sun . com).
August 28, 2008
FOSS, GNOME, NewZealand, OpenSolaris, Sun
1 Comment
The Wellingtonites, led by my very own Jayne, launched their initiative for Software Freedom Day. The event will, predictably, held on Saturday 20th September at the Convention Centre. We’re planning on having a hackfest organized by SuperHappyDevHouse (and br3nda), an installfest organized by WellyLug, and best of all, an open source BarCamp.
Really looking forward to this, and hoping a large crowd get out and register for this event. It’ll be a lot of fun. I’ll be doing a quick session on OpenSolaris, DTrace, and anything else I’m asked to do (perhaps an impromtu GNOME session?).
Hoping this is going to charge up the other teams around NZ into organizing events!
August 12, 2008
General, OpenSolaris
2 Comments
After picking up Petr’s excellent work to add IPS support to pkgbuild, generating IPS packages from SFE is now even easier.
Download an updated install image of pkgbuild, and put it in /opt. Now set up your usual desktop CBE environment, but add /opt/pkgbuild-beta/bin to the front of your path.
With the latest changes, pkgtool will automatically create an SVr4 package and generate the necessary IPS scripts and manifests and automatically publish to http://localhost:80/ (or $PKG_SERVER).
gman@rampage:~/SFE/$ pkgtool --interactive --download --ips build SFEmonkey-bubble.spec
though does not yet install them by default. It will however install an SVr4 package if you provide --svr4 at the command-line instead of --ips
If for some reason you decide to delete the contents of your repository, then you can simply
gman@rampage:~/$ cd packages/PKGMAPS/scripts
gman@rampage:~/packages/PKGMAPS/scripts/$ ./SFEmonkey-bubble_ips.ksh
to import the package.
The enhancements also try and detect the appropriate grouping from the freedesktop.org menu spec if you’ve defined ‘Group’ in your spec file, and will also attempt to add a license if you’ve specified it in ‘SUNW_Copyright’.
Next step, cleaning up SFE packages to include the right meta-information and copyrights/licenses.
August 5, 2008
General
4 Comments
I did a bit of work to clean up the existing downloadables page (now called OpenSolaris Artwork) – hopefully now you’ll know that there are cutsey iPhone backgrounds that you can download with the new OpenSolaris logo.
Dan also sent me a new set of OpenSolaris (.com) fan buttons – Go check them out!
August 4, 2008
OpenSolaris
2 Comments
Decided to spend some time playing around with IPS and SFE on Friday afternoon, to figure how easy it would be to contribute a package to our contributor package repository.
Set up an IPS repository
First things first, I set up a package repository locally. This was a piece of cake –
gman@rampage:~/# svccfg -s pkg/server "setprop pkg/inst_root=/var/repo"
gman@rampage:~/# svcadm refresh pkg/server
gman@rampage:~/# svcadm enable pkg/server
gman@rampage:~/# svcadm restart pkg/server
I tweaked the default configuration through SMF, changing the install root for the repository to be /var/repo.
Install the desktop CBE
Next, I set about installing the very useful desktop CBE, version 1.7 rc1, a test version which has support for OpenSolaris, multiple compilers, and new interactive goodness in the installer.
gman@rampage:~/desktop-cbe-1.7.0-rc1# cbe-install
The CBE tools install into /opt/dtbld and mostly consist of a bunch of GNU utilities whose versions are a little bit newer than what’s on pkg.opensolaris.org.
Download SFE
Next up, was grabbing a copy of the SFE repository. SFE, or spec-files-extra, is a repository full of build recipes for various open source component, which the pkgbuild tool uses to build into a SVr4 package (native IPS packages are coming soon). SFE has just over 800 recipes at the moment – it used to be 1000+, but as packages get added to pkg.opensolaris.org, they get removed from the repository.
gman@rampage:~/# svn co https://pkgbuild.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/pkgbuild/spec-files-extra/trunk SFE
Build a package
I figured I’d start off building monkey-bubble, using the SFEmonkey-bubble.spec build recipe. A simple command started off the build
gman@rampage:~/SFE# pkgtool build --interactive --download SFEmonkey-bubble.spec
As it turns out, I had issues with the current version of GNU m4 on the system, and had to quickly install CBEm4 from the desktop CBE. Once it did that, I had some shiny monkey-bubble packages in ~/packages/PKGS/.
Import this package into IPS
This was by far the most tricky step, though not ridiculously so. There are a number of ways to import a package into IPS, including the pkgsend(1) command-line utility (Volker gives a good tutorial here). I decided to cheat somewhat, and use the solaris.py utility that we’ve used to import packages from the old Nevada dock. To get the gate, a simple hg(1) command is used –
gman@rampage:~/# hg clone ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/pkg/gate pkg
Creating the import files
While a little overkill for this purpose, I created a cluster import file, and import files for both SFEmonkey-bubble and SFEmonkey-bubble-root –
gman@rampage:~/ cat cluster.all
include SFEmonkey-bubble
gman@rampage:~/ cat SFEmonkey-bubble
package SFEmonkey-bubble
import SFEmonkey-bubble
import SFEmonkey-bubble-root
version 0.4.0
end package
gman@rampage:~/ cat SFEmonkey-bubble-root
package SFEmonkey-bubble-root
depend SFEmonkey-bubble
end package
With IPS we’ve taken the decision to merge multiple packages into a single one, and use filtering if want want to separate them eg. documentation, developer headers, licenses, etc.. I’ve decided to create a single SFEmonkey-bubble package in the IPS repository.
Run the import script
Now we’ve got everything ready, it’s a simple command to run (so long as you remember the locations of where things are!) –
gman@rampage:~/ pkg/src/util/distro-import/solaris.py -b 0.4 -w ~/packages/PKGS/ cluster.all
The command will output a bunch of stuff, but by the end of it, you’ll be able to go to http://localhost:10000 in a browser and see the SFEmonkey-bubble package in the repository.
Install the package
Now that you’ve created a repository, and seeded it with a package, it’s time to add it to your system. You’ll need to add the new repository to the list that IPS should search through, and refresh the catalog before you can install it –
gman@rampage:~/ pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://localhost:10000/ localrepo
gman@rampage:~/ pfexec pkg refresh --full
gman@rampage:~/ pfexec pkg install SFEmonkey-bubble
Refresh the desktop cache
After successfully installing it, you’ll need to do a temporary step to ensure the GConf schemas are properly installed – this is because we now have a new SMF service to update the various desktop caches, but unfortunately IPS does not yet start this service when it installs a new package yet.
gman@rampage:~/ pfexec svcadm restart desktop-cache/gconf-cache
Pull my package
The final step is to send my IPS repository URL to the maintainers of pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib, so they can run a simple command to pull in the package –
admin@pkgserver:~/ pfexec pkgrecv -s http://myrepo.com:10000/ SFEmonkey-bubble
Final thoughts
Setting up an IPS repository isn’t the hardest thing in the world, though it does show that we’ve still got a little way to go to simplify the procedure. More and more packages are continuously getting added (ARC mail archives), and over time I expect this to be much, much easier to do. With Petr’s work to make pkgbuild output native IPS packages, I’m very hopeful to see OpenSolaris really starting to provide the common packages that people are using. If you are keen to help, join the pkgbuild team and start packaging for OpenSolaris today!
Update: Petr has published a first beta release of the pkgbuild IPS conversion – go check it out!
