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Newsletter Archive: 2006

OpenSolaris Newsletter: January 2006

Overview

January 2006 marks about six months since the OpenSolaris project opened. The community continues to grow, which is demonstrated by a wide variety of metrics. More communities and projects are opening on the site, which is generating significant levels of conversation across the mail lists; the OpenSolaris Charter conversation has largely come to fruition and Constitution conversations have begun; new code has been released with still more on the way; contributions continue to be offered and integrated; and sections of the website have been updated to make it easier to participate.

January was also a time when this newsletter entered its second month of open operations, and we are starting to see some interest from community members who want to participate. The newsletter will live within the Content Project for now, and we hope that writers from the community will start to draft some news pieces we can highlight. The newsletter is still going out late, and for that we apologize. We are improving, however, and with next month's issue we'll be on time. Starting with the February issue, each newsletter will be published on the first day of the following month. So, the February issue will go out on March 1.

Community Status

Community Advisory Board

In late January, the OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board (CAB) and Solaris engineering came to agreement about the OpenSolaris Charter - which basically outlines the terms of reference for the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) and the OpenSolaris community. Additionally, the CAB has created a governance working group, invited community members Keith Wesolowski and Ben Rockwood to participate, and initiated conversations to complete the OpenSolaris Constitution. Just as the Charter was developed in the open on the CAB's list with community feedback, the Constitution will also be developed, debated, and ratified in the open.

User Groups

If you are interested in forming a user group or participating in a group in your area, check in on the OpenSolaris User Group Community. There are 26 groups now. Here are some highlights from January:

  • The Atlanta OpenSolaris User Group met on January 10th. Topics of discussion included what's new in OpenSolaris, building & accessing OpenSolaris source, and lightening talks.
  • Warangal OpenSolaris User Group met on January 12th. Topics of discussion included smart card source integration into OpenSolaris and issues around the NIT Warangal India students starting an OpenSolaris user group.
  • The Front Range OpenSolaris User Group met on January 19th to discuss ZFS and hear from Mark Maybee, a Solaris engineer who has spent the last five years working on ZFS.
  • The Sydney OpenSolaris User Group met on January 25th with talks from James McPherson on getting to know the SAN stack, Brendan Gregg on Zone resource controls, and Alan Hargreaves on non-debug OpenSolaris.
  • The Silicon Valley OpenSolaris User Group met on January 26th with Max Bruning as the main speaker talking about OpenSolaris drivers.
  • New OpenSolaris User Groups created recently include Germany, Turkey, and French.

Projects & Communities

New communities and projects are forming consistently on OpenSolaris. Here is a summary for January:

  • The OpenSolaris Systems Administrators Community opened on January 11th for systems administrators, engineers, and architects to collaborate and enhance the manageability of OpenSolaris.
  • TheEthernet bridge project opened on January 10th to maintain a software Ethernet bridge module for Solaris.
  • The OpenSolaris ARC Community opened on January 13th and is responsible for driving the development, deployment, and use of transparent processes that guide the evolution of the OpenSolaris architecture, both at the macro (systems) and micro (project) levels.
  • The Appliances Community also opened in January to sift the enormous configuration permutations of hardware, application software and OpenSolaris itself and to provide low cost, feature rich appliances for all (especially for the home and the small office).
  • The OpenSolaris Storage Community opened on January 27th and is dedicated to the storage software in OpenSolaris.
  • The OpenSolaris Content Project opened on January 30th. This project will provide a forum for community members interested in writing, editing, and reviewing a variety of OpenSolaris content.
  • In late January, the PowerPC community launched a new community site called Polaris, which is a project name for the OpenSolaris port to the PowerPC architecture. The site is based on Trac open source software and has resources like wiki, ticket tracking, and project management.

Contributions

  • The request-sponsor program continues to be successful. Four putbacks were integrated in January. At the end of the month we had a total of 34 contributions putback, two were awaiting sponsors, and 18 had sponsors and were in progress. A total of 76 request-sponsor contributions have been offered since launch. Full details on the contributions are in the request-sponsor report. Also, there is information about the request-sponsor process as well.
  • We are beginning conversations about how to quantify contributions (code and non-code) and recognize those community members who contribute to the project, such as offering articles, artwork, documentation, code, etc. In the upcoming months, look for some new pages on the website that will start listing contributions.

Conversations

  • Conversations on the OpenSolaris Jive discussion forums topped the 2 million views mark since the project opened. That's a significant level of conversation occurring on the community's 91 mail lists. Also, just recently, the forums attracted the highest number of unique visitors for one week: 57,577. What this means is that the OpenSolaris community conversation is continuing to grow and is engaging new people.

Technical Status

New Components

Website Functionality

  • The Downloads Page was updated to better reflect OpenSolaris as a whole. It was originally an ON consolidation page because at launch that was the only source code available. Now that more consolidation source code and binaries are available, a picture of the whole program hopefully provides easier navigation to find pieces that interest you. This page lists the Solaris consolidations and their availability. Where binaries and/or source are available, there are links to specific download pages that contain details about the technology and how to access and work with it.
  • The Communities Portal was updated. The icons and information explaining how to get involved in OpenSolaris have moved to the Project Overview Page. In its place is information about what a community is and how to create and manage one. It also points to project information as a comparison.
  • The Projects Portal was updated. It includes an explanation of what a project is and how to create and manage one. It points to the community information as a comparison.
  • Input about these changes and/or other aspects of the website are welcome on the website-discuss email alias.

Projects

Marketing Status

Metrics

  • Seventy new members per week joined the OpenSolaris community throughout January. By the end of January, however, the rate of people joining grew to about 100 per week. The total for the community now stands at 11,400. The number of postings to discussion groups throughout the month was around 700 messages per week. More data can be found in the marketing community.

January's Newsletter Contributors

Editor: Linda Bernel
Contributors: Bonnie Corwin, Patrick Finch, Jim Grisanzio, Cyril Plisko.

OpenSolaris Newsletter: February 2006

Overview

In February, the OpenSolaris Charter was approved by Sun and the Community Advisory Board, the OpenSolaris Community started ramping up on the formation of development projects, more source and binary technology was released, a variety of contributions continue to be offered, some external code contributions have led to ARC cases, and source code management conversations are increasing. February was a short month but a busy one nonetheless.

This newsletter attempts to offer a snapshot of the OpenSolaris Program and what's going on within the community. Because the project is large and diverse, we realize we can't capture everything in every issue. We are considering adding some new categories to the newsletter - such as a "Community & Project Highlights" section, where one group would have some space to talk about any important development; an "Anecdote of the Month" section, where a community member could tell a brief personal story about some issue or experience; and a "Conferences" section, where community members can talk about their travels to various events around the world. If there are areas in which you feel you'd like to contribute to this publication, please feel free to suggest them. You can talk to us on the program-team mail list or the opensolaris-discuss mail list.

Community Status

    • OpenSolaris Governing Board

On Wednesday February 8th, the OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board voted to approve the OpenSolaris Charter. Two days later, Sun Microsystems also approved the Charter, and the document was signed by Glenn Weinberg, vice president of Sun's Operating Platforms Group. The OpenSolaris Charter enfranchises the "OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) to manage and direct an OpenSolaris community in its efforts to improve upon and advocate in favor of OpenSolaris, so that the community may long endure." The current CAB members now comprise the initial OGB, and their first order of business is to create the OpenSolaris Constitution. These governance conversations have already begun, and the documents will be written, debated, iterated, and ratified in the open - just as the Charter was developed in the open. OpenSolaris community members are encouraged to comment on any governance-related matter on the OGB's list.

 Projects & Communities

OpenSolaris currently has 38 communities and 7 projects, with new communities and projects being discussed and proposed regularly on the mail lists. During the first few months of OpenSolaris, mostly communities formed. Now that the site has support for projects, however, most of the activity is around the formation of development projects. This trend is expected to continue. In February, one new community and five new projects were opened:

 Projects approved for future opening include: Key Management Framework, Resource Management, Solaris on zSeries Mainframe Servers, and /usr/ sfw Nevada. Communities approved for future opening include: Packaging, Installation, and Distribution. Several additional communities have been proposed but are not yet approved.

Contributions

Our goal is to highlight a variety of contributions that community members are offering. Here are some contributions this month:

  • Three ON code contributions (here, here, here) were integrated in February. Note that the most recent one was code for an RFE that required ARC approval. This is our first ARC approval for an external contribution - congratulations to Rich Lowe for the contribution and to Dan Price for his sponsorship.
  • At the end of the month, a total of 37 contributions had been integrated, three were awaiting sponsors, and 24 had sponsors and were in progress. A total of 89 request-sponsor contributions have been offered since launch. Full details on these code contributions are in the request-sponsor report.
  • Two other ARC cases are in progress related to external code contributions: one about pools submitted by Robert Milkowski and one about a tty lock program submitted by Rich Teer. Both are being sponsored by Darren Moffat. A table will be created next month to track ARC cases like the request-sponsor report tracks code contributions. Also next month, the materials associated with these cases will be published in the ARC community.
  • An article about getting started with OpenSolaris using VMWare was contributed to the Content Project by Bill Rushmore. It can be viewed on the articles page. Ignacio Marambio Catán is in the process of translating several articles into Spanish and plans to make those documents available to the community. Several additional content contributions have been proposed as well.

Conversations

  • In February, conversations on the 96 Jive discussion forums topped the 2.3 million views mark since the project opened. The forums have also garnered just under a million unique visitors since launch.
  • In an effort to help community members keep up with who's talking about what across a wide variety of OpenSolaris communities and projects, Eric Boutilier has created a series of mail-list "roll up reports," which are like meta-digests. The reports were prompted by the expansion of new communities and projects on opensolaris.org (each of which have their own mail list forum) and the growth of forum traffic in general. The typical way to follow a forum is to periodically scan the header of every new post. The digests make this more efficient by providing a periodic (e.g. bi-weekly), condensed snapshot highlighting three things: (1) original posts made by lead members, (2) the size of each thread (topic popularity), and (3) who was posting and how much, and of those, which ones are community/project leaders. The digests are being posted on the opensolaris-discuss forum and on the web at del.icio.us. Use this link for an RSS feed.
    • User Groups
  • The Great Lakes (Chicago) OpenSolaris User Group (GLOSUG) met on February 7th with Chip Bennett presenting DTrace and Linda Kateley presenting Zones.
  • The NIT Warangal Opensolaris User Group met on February 19th. Keith Wesolowski presented "OpenSolaris for Contributors" to the NIT Warangal Technozion '06 Conference. Students from all over India participated in the event. This is the first Opensolaris User group to implement a live, remote demo with a presenter from Menlo Park, California. Skype was used for audio conference, and TightVNC was used for the demo. Keith's slides have been posted on the OpenSolaris Talks and Presentations page.
  • The Czech OpenSolaris User Group (CZOSUG) met on February 21 with Martin Cerveny presenting the current status of the OpenSolaris project. The group also discussed plans for the next meeting: "CZOSUG BootCamp - OS Installation and Device Driver Development."
  • The Silicon Valley OpenSolaris User Group (SVOSUG) met on February 23rd to discuss the SATA framework and Project Looking Glass.
  • The Front Range OpenSolaris User Group (FROSUG) met on February 23rd with Bill Kucharski presenting BrandZ..
    • Conferences

OSBC, February 14th: Because the Open Source Business Conference is not a developer gathering, OpenSolaris didn't have a significant presence there. However, Sun sent several executives, and OpenSolaris was discussed in multiple conversations. Jonathan Schwartz delivered the opening keynote, and Tim Bray and Bill Vass participated on several panels. Jim Grisanzio attended the conference and posted some photos.
 FOSDEM, February 25th and 26th: FOSDEM, on the other hand, is a free software developer gathering, and OpenSolaris did have a presence. Jonathan Haslam held a tutorial and gave a talk on DTrace, and both were very well attended. Stuart Kreitman and Jay Dobson attended the Xorg track and both gave talks.

 Education

A guide for using OpenSolaris within operating system classes was produced by Michelle Olsen for presentation at SIGCSE (Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education) 2006 event. The document is available for download here.

Technical Status

    • New Components
  • Solaris Express Community Release (SXCR) Build 33 was available for download on February 14th.
  • The latest ON source drop available is an interim snapshot of what will be Build 35. Please visit the ON Downloads Page to download.
  • The Development Tools consolidation (DevPro) made two components available this month. Source for the system math library was made available on February 22nd. Binaries for the microtasking library were made available on February 28th.
  • The Xen Project released its first source code snapshot on February 13th.
    • SCM Work

The preliminary evaluation phase for distributed SCM candidates ended on February 17th. Reports were submitted on multiple candidates, and discussion continues on multiple threads on the tools-discuss email alias: Monotone, Mercurial, and Bazaar. The next step is to try to eliminate some candidates to reduce the list. Once finalists are identified in early March, in-depth evaluation of those candidates will proceed.

OpenSolaris Community Statistics

For a variety of recent OpenSolaris statistics and graphics - including downloads, registered community members, referring domains, etc - please refer to the Community Metrics Page, which is updated every two weeks by the Marketing Community. The presentation of the format is under review, all input is welcome. Community growth is stable at approximately 130 new members per week, and this is accompanied by increased volumes of other community activity.

February's Newsletter Contributors

Editor: Linda Bernal
Contributors: Eric Boutilier, Bonnie Corwin, Patrick Finch, Jim Grisanzio, Muppalla Sridhar.

OpenSolaris Newsletter: March 2006

Quotes of the Month

Overview

In March the OpenSolaris community broke records for conversation activity on the more than 100 mail lists, and community members proposed and opened a significant number of projects. New tools source was released, a new consolidation opened, a variety of new contributions were offered, and the website was updated. Community members were also active at conferences and within user groups. Below is simply a snapshot of what's going on in the OpenSolaris community. The OpenSolaris community is bigger than what is represented in this newsletter, so if you are interested in contributing content it would be most welcome.

Community Status

Projects & Communities

  • There was one new community proposed in March: Solaris Internals. And two new communities opened: Installation & Packaging, and Immigrants. There are currently 40 communities on opensolaris.org.
  • Fifteen new projects were proposed in March, including: Removable Media Enhancements, DTrace Provider for NFSv4, Streaming Server, lofi Compression & Cryptography, Clearview Network Interface Coherence, Chime Visualization Tool for DTrace, Argentix, Nemo High Performance Networking, Crossbow Network Stack Virtualization & Resource Control, libumem Memory Allocator, FUSE on Solaris, Quagga Routing Protocol Suite Integration, Muskoka, Sparks Name Service Switch/nscd Enhancements, and Multiprotocol Label Switching
  • Projects opened include SFW Navada, Quagga, DTrace Provider for NFSv4, Clearview, Multiprotocol Label Switching and Crossbow. There are currently 15 projects on opensolaris.org.

Conferences

  • SIGCSE 2006. SIGCSE is the Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education, the eponymous event is its annual conference. In 2006 it took place in Houston, Texas, March 1st-5th. Around 1,200 computer science professors and professional educators from around the world (but mostly the US and especially the southern states) were present. OpenSolaris was represented by Russ Blaine, Patrick Finch, Teresa Giacomini, Eric Lowe and Michelle Olson from Sun and Sean Smith, assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth College. Eric posted his talk and demo on his blog. Particularly well received was the OpenSolaris Curriculum Development Guide (see Education below for the link).
  • JavaUK06. JavaUK06 took place on March 15th in London and was aimed at developers. Although billed primarily as a Java event, there was a strong Solaris presence as well. Alan Burlison from Sun manned an OpenSolaris stand and had a continual flow of people wanting to talk about OpenSolaris. Alan was asked how to get a copy to install and also fielded development questions about how the community works and how people can contribute. Visible external activity in the form of the external distributions was a real advantage, with BeleniX getting particular interest.

Contributions: Code

  • We've had eight code contributions put back into OpenSolaris via the request-sponsor program in March. Thanks to Rich Lowe, Juergen Keil, Rob Benson, and Robert Milkowski for the bug fixes. Also thanks to the Sun engineers for sponsoring the code to through to putback: Sara Jelinek, Darren Moffat, Dan Mick, Dan Price, Dana Myers, Rao Shoaib, Minskey Guo, and Dave Miner. Robert Milkowsk's fix (#45) led to a PSARC case.
  • Since we opened on June 14, 2005, we have a total of 92 code contributions offered to OpenSolaris. Forty seven have been integrated, 17 are in progress, and only three are awaiting sponsors. The majority of these fixes are oss-bite-size bugs that the Solaris engineers identified before we launched to get people started contributing code. We'll be increasing the number of bite-size bugs to help increase the number of code contributors.
  • You can see all the code contributors, their sponsors, and the bugs fixed in the code contributor report, and we are working on a contributor section for the website to point out all the code and non-code contributions we are getting on the project. Once we get all this organized, we think you'll see that people are contributing to OpenSolaris in a variety of ways. We expect that trend to continue, and we expect the contributions to diversify even more as the project matures.

Contributions: Documentation

  • See the Community Spotlight section below for details about documentation contributions.

User Groups

  • Dan Price created an OpenSolaris User Group Google Map so community members can easily see where user groups are forming. There are several other maps being created by community members to represent the OpenSolaris community, such as Laura Ramsey's map, Patrick Mauritz's map, Glynn Foster's map. Feel free to add yourself to your map of choice.
  • On March 11th, the first Czech OpenSolaris User Group (CZOSUG) Boot Camp was held in cooperation with faculty members of Mathematics and Physics from Charles University. Martin Cerveny covered installation and administration of OpenSolaris and the basics of kernel driver development. The group also held an installfest for members. Vita Batrla and Milan Jurik held a presentation on USB devices and especially on USB CDMA modem driver. Photos from the event can be found on the blogs of Petr Sumbera and Vita Batrla. The CZOSUG also started to cooperate with Audiovisual Centre Silicon Hill, which is a project of students of Czech Technical University to record and offer free video downloads of lectures and other events. The Boot Camp was recorded and hopefully future CZOSUG events will be recorded as well.
  • Anish Gupta presented "OpenSolaris Driver Development Primer" at the NIT Warangal User group on March 18th. Around 100 students attended the presentation, which is a record attendance at NITWOSUG.
  • The German OpenSolaris User Group had its first meeting at CeBIT and around 25 people attended. Detlef Drewanz, Stefan Schneider, and Ulrich Graef for Sun and Thomas Nau from the University of Ulm presented. Slides are here (table entry dated March 12th).
  • Dan Price presented "What is Solaris Nevada" at the Silicon Valley OpenSolaris User Group on March 23.
  • The Japanese OpenSolaris User Group held Solaris seminars and install events on March 20th and March 24rd.
  • The Front Range OpenSolaris User Group in Colorado met on March 28th. David Weibel from Sun presented information about the iSCSCI Initiator. Source can be accessed via the Storage community.

Marketing

  • Positive mentions in industry analyst reports from RedMonk, Forrester Research, and Gartner about OpenSolaris.
  • Ben Rockwood is profiled as a Sun Community Champion.

Education

  • Michelle Olson provided v1.0 of "Introduction to Operating Systems: A Hands-On Approach Using the OpenSolaris Project" student and instructor guides and Patrick Finch posted them on the Academic and Research Community under the heading Curriculum Development Guide.

Distributions

  • There are currently three non-Sun distributions of the OpenSolaris source code - Nexenta, SchilliX, and BeleniX. Schillix 0.5.1 became available on March 5th. NexentaOS (elatte) Alpha 4 became available for download on March 29th. BeleniX 0.4.1 became available on March 30th.
  • Distribution announcements can be found on their respective sites as well as the OpenSolaris announce list along with all community announcements.

Also Noteworthy

  • A book about OpenSolaris was published in Germany. See references here and here in German.
  • Glynn Foster published five news summaries for the OpenSolaris Community here, here, here, here, here.
  • In the first week of March, the OpenSolaris Jive discussion forums topped 1 million unique visitors for the first time. During the month, the community broke records several times for unique visitors to the forums as well as total views. By month's end the forums had a total of 2.7 million views with 1.2 unique visitors since launch.
  • Coinciding with CeBIT, iX Magazine features an "OpenSolaris XXL" DVD (links are to German language sites).

Community Spotlight: Documentation

The formal documentation community sponsor program is still in its infancy. Nonetheless, the OpenSolaris community is providing contributions that have been incorporated into Solaris documentation and the documentation community web site:

  • Thanks to community member Brendan Gregg who authored the initial version of the Primer for OpenSolaris posted here.
  • Thanks to community member Glenn Herteg who provided detailed feedback on IP Filter documentation. Thanks also to Sun technical writer Steff Brucker and Sun engineer Michael Lim for reviewing the feedback, addressing the comments, and incorporating fixes.
  • Glenn also authored a document that describes how to get full external DSL connectivity to a Solaris 10 box is posted here.
  • Thanks to Rainer Heilke for his contributions to the Documentation Community web pages, the style guide feedback captured in the beta version posted here, and for his testing of the XML Task template instructions posted here.
  • 8 documentation CRs have been filed through the OpenSolaris project. 4 have been resolved and modifications have been integrated into the docs. Thanks to Sun technical writers Alta Elstad and Cindy Swearingen for incorporating fixes.
  • 16 man page CRs have also been initiated through the OpenSolaris project. 14 have been resolved and integrated, and only 2 remain open. Thanks to Sun man page writers Virginia Chapman, Terry Gibson, Pattie Levinson, Mark Ruddell, Gary Parker, and Doug Stevenson for delivering these fixes.

Technical Status

New Components

  • Source for the Software Packaging Tools was made available on March 6th.
  • Source for the SFW Consolidation was made available on March 28th. Also see the SFW Nevada project page for information about this consolidation.
  • The Documentation consolidation (Docs) released source for two books this month. Source for the Device Driver Tutorial and the ZFS Administration Guide was made available on March 31st. Please visit the Documentation Downloads Page to download.
  • Source for the X11 Window System Consolidation was made available on March 31st.

SCM Work

  • Three DSCM finalists were identified: Bazaar, GIT and Mercurial. A Sun engineer was assigned to each for further evaluation. Work is in progress on a test harness that will be published.
  • Information about evaluation plans and tentative schedule were posted on the SCM page in the Tools community.
  • The entire community is encouraged to participate in the evaluation. A DSCM Candidate Evaluation Form should be filled out and sent to the tools-discuss alias.

Website

  • Derek Cicero announced a new version of the application, pushed out with a number of changes, most of which are not visible, such as migrating the application to JDK 1.5 and Tomcat 5.5. Public facing changes include:
    • Fixed a problem with dates before the year 1970 and after the year 9999.
    • Fixed a problem with reading blog feeds from Google Groups.
    • Fixed a problem with JTidy which caused Japanese characters in blog feeds to display incorrectly.
    • Fixed a problem where an SMTP error during registration would not propagate to the user.
    • Changed the layout of the site map to display projects in their own div.
    • Modified the allowed attachment types for projects and communities to "inherit" the attachment types of the site.
    • Added leadership information to the member profile page.
    • Upgraded to version 4.2.4 of Jive Forums.

Community and Website Statistics

Registrations and Discussions

  • The total number of registered users of OpenSolaris.org broke 12,000 at the start of the month, and we finish March with 12,628 members. The volume of discussion postings is increasing proportionately, although the number of page views on OpenSolaris.org itself is at a plateau of around 200,000 per week.

Call to Action: Name the OpenSolaris Newsletter

  • The editorial team believes that this newsletter needs a name and a logo. The current "OpenSolaris Community Newsletter" is boring. So, we are looking for naming ideas and logo artwork from the community. Sara Dornsife outlined a few guidelines on the discuss list. If you are interested, chime in.

March's Newsletter Contributors

Editor: Linda Bernal
Contributors: Bonnie Corwin, Nenad Cimerman, Detlef Drewanz, Patrick Finch, Jim Grisanzio, Katarina Machalkova, Sridhar Muppalla, Laura Ramsey, Michelle Olson, Sue Weber

OpenSolaris Newsletter: April 2006

Overview

In April the OpenSolaris Community broke records for the most number of projects opened and also for total views to the Jive web discussion forums. Also, new contributions were offered in the form of code, documentation, and DTrace scripts. Community members attended conferences in three countries, and a half dozen user groups held meetings around the world. And on the program engineering side, a distributed source code management solution was chosen after a comprehensive open evaluation process. It was a full month, and industry observers are starting and speak out about the progress of the OpenSolaris community.

Quotes of the Month

"Sun's response was to invest in R&D while the market settled - and today they virtually own the high end Opteron market, have the first products from their next generation architecture in the market, and have established the world's fastest growing open source community around Solaris." - Paul Murphy, ZDNet

"Solaris has attracted a vigorous developer community." - Charles Babcock, InformationWeek

"They're pushing the envelope," Tony Iams, an analyst at Ideas International, said about Sun's aggressive research and development efforts for Solaris.

"I'm fairly positive on the prospects for Solaris," O'Grady wrote. "It's really made remarkable strides in a short period of time."

"The OpenSolaris community has been highly successful by all accounts … it is a direct conversation … between Sun and its customers and partners as they develop the next interesting architecture play." - Stephen Walli.

"I think the move to OpenSolaris has been a good one. The move to open up their portfolio to Opteron and away from Sparc and moderate their investments there is a smart thing strategically." - Bill Zeitler, IBM's systems/technology group.

Community Status

Projects & Communities

There were nine projects opened in April - the most in a single month. The projects cover a range of technical subjects, and represent code, processes, and documentation.

Conferences

  • LinuxWorld Expo, Prague
    • Lukas Rovensky presented at LinuxExpo in Prague on April 10 about the activities of the CZOSUG. The presentation (in Czech) is accessible at the CZOSUG community page.
  • OpenSolaris in Brazil
    • In early April, Sun's Jonathan Schwartz met with the president of Brazil to talk about free and open source trends and the government's use of Solaris. Schwartz also met with some members of the OpenSolaris community in Brazil (images from Dimas Oliveira).
    • Steve Lau attended FISL in Brazil April 19th and 20th. Energy and interest in OpenSolaris were high. Take a look at his photos, and read about his adventures: getting ready, first post, days 1 & 2, food at FISL, and chaos. Steve was also the first person to produce a DVD with the latest build and source for an event, which he used at FISL. This is a great step forward for making OpenSolaris approachable.
  • MySQL Users Conference 2006, Santa Clara, California
    • Ben Rockwood attended the MySQL conference representing the OpenSolaris community. See Ben's blog.

Contributions

  • Code
    • There were 3 code contributions put back into OpenSolaris via the request-sponsor program in April bringing the total for the year up to 50. Thanks to Jürgen Keil, Yann Poupet and Stephen Potter for the bug fixes. Also thanks to the Sun engineers for sponsoring the code through to putback: Anish Gupta, David Bustos and Valerie Bubb.
    • You can see all the code contributors, their sponsors, and the bugs fixed in the code contributor report.
  • Documentation
    • 6 man page CRs were resolved in April due to community input. Thanks to Sun man page writers Peter Buch, Virginia Chapman, Pattie Levinson and Gary Parker for delivering these fixes. Thanks to community members Boyd Adamson, Chiaki Ishikawa, Theo Schlossnagle and Jonathan Wakely for their input.
  • Scripts
    • In late April, Brendan Gregg in Australia updated the latest build of The DTraceToolkit - which is a collection of scripts developed by the DTrace community. This is yet another way developers around the world are contributing to to the OpenSolaris community. Currently, The DTraceToolkit contains104 scripts.

User Groups

  • The Warangal OpenSolaris User Group met on April 9th, Frank Dimambro from Chelsio communications gave a presentation on "High performance DLPI drivers".
  • The Czech OpenSolaris User Group (CZOSUG) met April 11th for two two presentations - Lubos Kosco and Marin Man from the OP/N1 RPE team in Czech presented about Sun Grid Engine and gave a brief demonstration using four Ferraris. Frank Hofmann from OP/N1 RPE team UK presented about writing a file system driver for Solaris. Both presentations were recorded, and Frank's presentation is already available for public view. Also, here are some photos of the presentations.
  • The FROSUG held a meeting on Thursday April 20th. Stuart Maybee presented Xen.
  • The Sydney OpenSolaris User group (SOSUG) held its sixth meeting on April 26th with Brendan Gregg speaking about the upcoming Solaris Internals Book and Bill Moore and Jeff Bonwick presenting on ZFS. See Alan Hargreaves' blog for details and photos.
  • The SVOSUG held a meeting on Thursday, April 27th. Steve Lau did a brief presentation about Source Code Management, and Bart Smaalders and Phil Hartman talked about performance.
  • The Hyderabad OpenSolaris User Group (HOSUG) opened in India on April 27th. Subhash Thakur will be leading this group.

Distributions

  • A new distribution became available this month: marTux-0.1. This is a LiveCD for SPARC (sun4u for now; sun4v later).
  • SchilliX-0.5.2 became available on April 7th.
  • Belenix 0.4.2 became available on April 9th.

Also Noteworthy

Technical Status

SCM Work

Community and Website Statistics

Registrations and Discussions

  • The last week of April brought a new record for total views to the 113 OpenSolaris Jive discussion forums of more than 131,000. That brings the total views to the forums to 3.2 million since the project opened last year.
  • The total number of registered members passed 13,000 in April, and the rate of registrations remains fairly constant at around 120 members per week.
  • Website and community stats are updated regularly. Feedback is always welcome.

April's Newsletter Contributors

Editor: Linda Bernal
Contributors: Bonnie Corwin, Patrick Finch, Jim Grisanzio, Sridhar Muppalla, Lukas Rovensky

OpenSolaris Newsletter: May 2006

Overview

For the OpenSolaris community, May was all about code contributions - with almost twice as many integrations than any previous month. The community was also active in user groups and at conferences including the 2006 China ERC in Beijing and in San Francisco at JavaOne. Progress has also being made on SCM infrastructure. On tap next month? The community's one year anniversary.

Quotes of the Month

  • I agree with Sun's Bryan Cantrill that the FreeBSD port is indisputably useful. - John Birrell, the developer porting DTrace to FreeBSD
  • This is great. It's great that Sun gives external contributors like myself the opportunity to put changes into Solaris. - Peter Tribble, OpenSolaris developer.
  • The biggest, most obvious, and generally in your face, strategic enabler here is Sun's community development license.... - Paul Murphy, reporter.
  • Jonathan Schwartz was telling people that all Sun software would be open source and the OpenSolaris folks were showing us how it could be done … - Dave Johnson, Java developer.

Community Status

Projects & Communities

Community Highlight: BrandZ Takes Code Contributions

BrandZ is a community project seeking to provide a framework for system emulation using Zones. The first Brand is 'lx', which emulates Linux. The project has been open since December 2005. Since then we've released several updates and have taken some code contributions. Recently, Juergen Hannken-Illjes fixed three bugs that were impacting applications he was trying to run under BrandZ:

  • 6389317 clone()d threads using stdio may segmentation fault glibc
  • 6353934 SIOCGIFNAME must return Linux device names in BrandZ
  • 6391195 clone() CLONE_THREAD fails to return created thread id to caller

 The first two fixes are currently available in the BrandZ project releases, and the third will be integrated in a few weeks. All three will be included with our final integration into OpenSolaris. - Edward Pilatowicz

Conferences

  • OpenSolaris participated in the 2006 China ERC. See references with photos here, here, and here.
  • OpenSolaris community members participated in several activities at JavaOne in May, including the Freedom Toaster, a DTrace session, and a DTrace challenge at the Sun booth. There are some photos of various events as well. Also, Sun also recast the Java license at JavaOne to enable distributions on GNU/Linux and OpenSolaris.
  • SANE 2006, Delft, The Netherlands. Liane Praza and Casper Dik both spoke at SANE and held a BOF and "Guru-is-in" Session. The OpenSolaris ISO created by Stephen Lau was of particular use, and about 200 copies were distributed to conference attendees.

Contributions of Consolidation Code

  • May was a busy month for code. There were 18 code contributions put back into OpenSolaris via the request-sponsor program in May, bringing the total for the year up to 69. This month saw the first putback to a consolidation other than ON - congratulations to the Install consolidation!
  • Thanks to Henry Grebler, Yann Poupet, Juergen Keil, Stephen Potter, Rich Lowe and Hiroshi Nakano for the ON bug fixes. Also thanks to Sun ON engineers for sponsoring the code through to putback: Dan Groves, Eric Lowe, Alan Perry, John Levon, Steve Lau, Pete Dennis, Brian Utterback, Minskey Guo and Carol Fields.
  • Thanks to Peter Tribble for bug fixes for the Install consolidation and to Dave Miner for sponsoring the code through to putback.
  • You can see all the code contributors, their sponsors, and the bugs fixed in the code contributor report.

User Groups

  • The Turkey OpenSolaris User Group (TOSUG) held their second meeting on May 15th. Afsin Taskiran gave a seminar about OpenSolaris.
  • The Silicon Valley User group (SVOSUG) held a one year birthday celebration at JavaOne on May 16th.
  • The Front Range OpenSolaris User Group (FROSUG) in Colorado held a meeting on May 23rd. Dave Hagerty gave a talk about "Installing OpenSolaris and Sun Studio Development Tools."
  • The Sydney OpenSolaris User group (SOSUG) had its seventh meeting on May 23rd. Nathan Kroenert gave a talk entitled "Why Niagara is almost as good as Rare Steak."

Distributions

Also Noteworthy

Technical Status

SCM Work

  • Milestones for SCM work were published.
  • ON SCM-related tool information was published to enable the community to engage in the work on tools that will be necessary as part of the transition to a new SCM system.
  • Conversation continues on tools-discuss about work in progress and plans. Sign up and join the discussion.

Website

  • Derek Cicero announced a new version of the application. Public-facing changes include the following. For detail about the changes, see Derek's email.
    • Page names are not required to be unique within their space.
    • Objects can have mixed-case names.
    • Search results will include a list of categories of results.
    • Multiple search results for the same blog entry will be aggregated.
    • The unused "Builds" feature has been removed.
    • Fixed TML bugs.
    • Changed several administrative features.
    • Jive message bodies will be displayed in a mono spaced font.

Community and Website Statistics

Registrations and Discussions

  • Steady as she goes: every week we continue to see 120+ new members of OpenSolaris.org. It will be interesting to see if and when this pattern changes.
  • There was a drop-off in the volume of discussions and blogs during the week of JavaOne: were our most vociferous community members all tied up in San Francisco that week? Intriguingly, in the same period we saw a record number of views on the Jive forums. OpenSolaris now has 114 discussion forums, and the total views and unique visitors to the forums continues to increase.

May's Newsletter Contributors

Editor: Linda Bernal
Contributors: Bonnie Corwin, Patrick Finch, Jim Grisanzio

OpenSolaris Newsletter: June 2006

Overview

June was a month of records and celebration for the OpenSolaris community. The community celebrated its one year anniversary on June 14th and broke new records for conversations and code contributions. But perhaps even more important for our future growth, significant progress has been made with OpenSolaris outreach at universities in China and India. So, the community continues to grow on multiple levels and enters its second year full of promise.

Quotes of the Month

We collect OpenSolaris quotes on del.icio.us. Here are a couple of nice ones recently:

  • The project has - in my view anyway - been extremely successful in keeping to the original Solaris ethos while developing a strong OpenSolaris community. - Peter Tribble in ZDNet, June 13, 2006
  • Sun's OpenSolaris based CDDL is growing like a wildfire in a high wind in part because it's a safe haven for those looking to hedge their bets. - Paul Murphy, ZDNet, June 21, 2006

Community Status

    • The First OpenSolaris Anniversary
    • Jive Discussion Forums
    • Projects & Communities
  • Two projects were opened this month: NTP and Enhanced SMF Profiles.
  • Seven new projects were proposed this month: CIFS Client; Modernize Syslogd; Non-root Install; IPsec Tunnel Reform; Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP); JDS Single Administration; and Myricom 10GE Driver.
  • OpenSolaris now has 31 open projects with another 12 that are approved but not yet opened.
    • OpenSolaris in Education: An Overview from the East

University Days in China

Sun has sponsored University Days on campus at several colleges and universities to spread the word about Sun technology, including OpenSolaris. In the past few months, events were held at Neusoft Institute of Information, Beijing Jiaotong University, Renmin University, Xi'An Institute of Technology, Xi'An University of Electronics Science and Technology, Xi'An Jiaotong University, China Petroleum University and Capital Normal University in China. These events were attended by more than 3,000 students, faculty and researchers. Check out Sin-Yaw Wang's blog for more information.

OpenSolaris Starter Kit

The Starter Kit project has finally taken off and is moving along nicely. This kit is designed for students and anyone else who is new to OpenSolaris. It will be released in phases, with the first phase being published in late July. You can find more info here and here.

Curriculum Materials

Plug-in materials for an introductory operating systems course have been developed by a group of computer science professors in China. These modules allow a professor to pick and choose which concepts they would like to teach using OpenSolaris as an example. Train-the-professor sessions were held in 6 cities throughout China to assist professors in using these materials. To further expand the reach of the materials, they have been donated to the China Ministry of Education. The materials will be posted for everyone's use very soon here.

India Outreach

In India, Solaris engineers are building strong relationships with several universities to expose students to OpenSolaris and open source technologies.

  • A Tech Fest was held at RVCE. More than 200 students participated in the 'Kill Bill' programming contest based on OpenSolaris.
  • A Tech Day was held at PESIT, a local university in Bangalore. Students there have chosen to participate in a special Sun track where they will learn about and participate in the OpenSolaris community among others. By participating in the Sun track, students will have insight into internship and job opportunities at Sun.
  • Fifteen 90 minute lectures were aired via satellite to more than 100 engineering colleges in the State of Karnataka via the VTU Education Satellite program. Each session had an average attendance of approximately 1500 engineering students.
    • Conferences
  • Dave Nelson spoke about using OpenSolaris in operating system courses at the 20th Annual Colorado Technology in Education conference on June 21st.
  • Fintan Ryan, Nicky Veitch, and Tim Foster attended ApacheCon Europe in Dublin June 26-28th. You can read about the goings on in Fintan's blog. They took advantage of the gathering at ApacheCon to hold an Irish OpenSolaris User Group Meeting.
  • Simon Phipps, Jon Haslam, and Patrick Finch will be at LUGRadio Live in Wolverhampton, UK July 22 - 24th. You can find out more about LUGRadio Live here.
  • OSCON is coming up at the end of next month, July 24 - 28. If you plan to be up in Portland, please come by the Sun booth. OpenSolaris will be there in force. There will be two BoFs: "OpenSolaris Virtualization" and "Consolidating Servers with OpenSolaris, ZFS and Zones". Plus there will be plenty of engineers in the booth talking about our community and our code. Come join us.
    • Contributions to Consolidation Code
  • June set a record for contributions. There were 21 code contributions put back into OpenSolaris via the request-sponsor program in June, bringing the total to 106.
  • Thanks to Rainer Orth, Richard Lowe, Peter Tribble, Stephen Potter, Yann Poupet, Jeremy Teo and Juergen Keil for ON bug fixes. Also thanks to Sun ON engineers for sponsoring the code through to putback: Sarah Jelinek, Eric Lowe, Jim Carlson, Liane Praza, Craig Mohrman, Carol Fields, April Chin, Eric Saxe, Krishna Yenduri and Alan Perry.
  • You can see all the code contributors, their sponsors, and the bugs fixed in the code contributor report.
    • User Groups
  • The  Atlanta OpenSolaris User Group (ATLOSUG) met on June 13th. George Wilson gave a ZFS update, and Scott Dickinson presented ZFS and Zones integration.
  • The Irish OpenSolaris User Group met on June 14th to hear a ZFS "fly-through" and an overview of OpenSolaris' first year.
  • The  Silicon Valley User group (SVOSUG) met in Santa Clara on Thu, June 22nd. Josh Berkus spoke on the Postgres database and how it relates to Solaris/OpenSolaris.
  • The Bangalore OpenSolaris User Group (BOSUG) held a meeting on June 24th to discuss "Creating an OpenSolaris Distribution."
  • The Front Range OpenSolaris User Group (FROSUG) in Colorado held a meeting on June 27th. An "Installfest" was held to help people install Solaris and OpenSolaris builds. Sanjay Nadkarni did a presentation about "The Future of Install in OpenSolaris."


 Distributions

Technical Status

    • New Components
  • The DevPro consolidation released source for medialib on June 12th. This library is a collection of C functions that support multimedia processing.
  • The Docs consolidation released source for two more books on June 30th: OpenSolaris Developer's Reference Guide and Solaris Containers: Resource Management and Solaris Zones Developer's Guide. See the Docs download page for details.
    • SCM Work
  • Milestones for SCM work were updated.
  • Work on Subversion (SVN) support on the site is progressing: host support and web app support for managing repositories. Beta testing by the Companion CD and JDS teams will begin next month.
    • Also Noteworthy

June's Newsletter Contributors

Editor: Linda Bernal
Contributors: Eric Boutilier, Bonnie Corwin, Teresa Giacomini, Jim Grisanzio

OpenSolaris Newsletter: July/August 2006

Overview

During the last couple of months, OpenSolaris community members have participated at O'Reilly's OSCON and LinuxWorld conferences and held a number of user group meetings, including a first for the Moscow OpenSolaris User Group. Apple surprised us all with a port of DTrace to Mac OS, and a new port of ZFS to FreeBSD is underway so OpenSolaris technology continues to spread throughout the meta community. Back at home, the program continues to unfold with progress in source code management, code contributions, documentation releases, the opening of new projects on the site, and some bug fixes to the site itself. The opening of the system continues, and the community continues to grow.

Quote of the Month

OpenSolaris is not only powerful, but it is very innovative … it truly opens new horizons for us to explore - Nexenta, July 5, 2006

Community Status

Discussion Forums

The 137 OpenSolaris Jive discussion forums are not only the source of hundreds of technical conversations, but they also contain two regular reports from Eric Boutilier and Glynn Foster to help inform community members about what's going on in the community. Here are links to the reports:

Projects & Communities

Conferences

  • OpenSolaris participated at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland this July. See Stephen Harpster and Glynn Foster for some links.
  • OpenSolaris will also be contributing to all of Sun's Tech Days conferences around the world, so check the schedule for a location near you. There will be technical presentations on OpenSolaris technology as well as a free "OpenSolaris Day" as part of each conference. It's good venue to meet other community members and start user groups. And if you'd like to present, let us know because we are always looking for new speakers.
  • OpenSolaris community members also planned and ran the activities at LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco recently. Ben Rockwood led the effort and has a summary on his blog.

Contributions to Consolidation Code

  • There were 10 code contributions put back into OpenSolaris via the request-sponsor program in July, bringing the total to 116.
  • Thanks to Juergen Keil, Ruben Rabadan, Rich Lowe, Mike Gerdts and Stephen Potter for ON bug fixes. Also thanks to Sun ON engineers for sponsoring the code through to putback: Jan Setje-Eilers, Ienup Sung, Sarah Jelinek, Dan Price, Cyndy Eastham, Steve Lau and Minskey Guo.
  • Thanks to Peter Tribble for Install bug fixes, and thanks to Sun engineer Dave Miner for sponsoring the code through to putback.
  • There were three code contributions put back into OpenSolaris via the request-sponsor program in August, bringing the total to 119.
  • Thanks to Peter Tribble and Juergen Keil for ON bug fixes. And thanks to Sun ON engineers Cyndy Eastham and Jan Setje-Eilers for sponsoring the code through to putback.
  • You can see all the code contributors, their sponsors, and the bugs fixed in the code contributor report.

User Groups

The user group community on opensolaris.org is clearly growing faster, and we expect even more growth this year as we collaborate with Sun's global Tech Day's developer tour. We'd like to set up user groups at every venue that Tech Days visits.

  • User Group Spotlight: The Irish OpenSolaris User Group resumed its activities during the summer, holding meetings in June, July & August. We covered some pretty large topics, such as ZFS, DTrace and an Installfest: subjects we'll almost certainly revisit in future talks. Now that the Irish colleges are coming back from their summer break, we expect a lot more activity in the group since there's plenty to talk about. We hold our meetings on the last Tuesday of each month, but we would be delighted to make exceptions if there's any visitors coming to Ireland who'd like to do a presentation. - Tim Foster
  • The Sydney User Group met on July 6th. Alan Hargreaves spoke on Open Solaris: The road traveled so far, and Brendan Gregg spoke on the upcoming Solaris Internals book.
  • The Atlanta User Group met on Tuesday, July 11th and August 8th. At July's meeting Alok Aggarwal, from Sun's Solaris Engineering Group presented NFSv4. At August's meeting, topics of discussion included, an update on some of the things that have gone into OpenSolaris in the last few builds and an introduction to DTrace.
  • The Silicon Valley User Group met on July 25th and August 24th. At July's meeting Tim Marsland presented "The Zen on Xen". Jim Mauro and Richard McDougall stopped in to give a short presentation. At August's meeting, Sunay Tripathi presented Crossbow.
  • The Singapore OpenSolaris User Group met on July 27th. Chris Harvey led a discussion on Singanix.
  • The Irish OpenSolaris User Group met for the third time on July 25th. Sean McGrath, an engineer in the Sun Ireland Performance Group gave introduction to the Dynamic Tracing facility in OpenSolaris. See Tim Foster's blog for a summary of the meeting. The fourth meeting took place on August 29th, which included an install fest.
  • The Bangalore OpenSolaris User Group met on July 29th to discuss Zones and Resource Controls.
  • The Moscow OpenSolaris User Group met for the first time on August 11th to discuss the year in review for OpenSolaris as well as some of the key issues in two books: Solaris Internals II and Solaris Performance and Tools.
  • The Front Range OpenSolaris User Group FROSUG) in Colorado held a meeting on August 29th. The "Installfest" was continued while celebrating the groups one-year anniversary and discussing ideas and topics for the upcoming year.
  • The NIT Warangal Opensolaris User Group held a meeting on August 30th. Scott Dickson gave technical talk on "Solaris Containers". The attendance was extremely successful with 120 students.
  • The Shanghai OpenSolaris User Group opened in China on August 31st. The group is getting ready for its first meeting at Sun's Tech Days in late September. China now has two user groups: Beijing and Shanghai.

Distributions

  • BeleniX 0.4.4 was available for download on July 11th.
  • Links to all OpenSolaris distributions on the downloads page.

Technical Status

New Components

  • The Docs consolidation released source for two more books on July 28th. See the Docs download page for detail.
    • Solaris Volume Manager System Administration Guide,
    • Solaris Express Installation Guide: Basic Installations.
  • The Docs consolidation released source for eight more books on August 31st. See the Docs download page for detail.
    • Solaris Trusted Extensions Installation and Configuration Guide
    • Solaris Trusted Extensions Label Administration,
    • Solaris Trusted Extensions User's Guide,
    • Solaris Trusted Extensions Transition Guide,
    • Solaris Trusted Extensions Developer's Guide,
    • Solaris Express Installation Guide: Solaris Flash Archives (Creation and Installation),
    • System Administration Guide: Basic Administration,
    • System Administration Guide: Advanced Administration.

SCM Work

  • Milestones for SCM work are updated.
  • Internal beta testing encountered some problems related to recent major changes to our site hosting machines that pushed dates out.
  • JDS made a test Subversion (SVN) repository available on August 30th for Beta testing.
  • The Companion CD and ON are targeting the week of September 5th-8th to make test repositories available. The Companion CD will be a Subversion repository and the ON repository will be a Mercurial repository.

Website

  • Derek Cicero announced a new version of the application on August 28th. Public-facing changes include the following. For the full list of changes and detail, see Derek's email.
    • Old URLs can now be redirected to a new location via the new Redirect Mappings feature.
    • Files attached to pages will now be indexed for searching.
    • Added public keys to user profile (for SCM) and exposed them in Edit Profile, Add User Account, and Edit User Account.
    • Blogs RSS and OPML feeds are now available.
    • HTML files attached to pages will be displayed with a minimal decorator.
    • Jive search form includes link to Advanced Search page.
    • Added a feature to Jive Forums to allow a poster to copy their posting to other forums.
    • The algorithm for re-ordering child pages has been changed.
    • Added description to search results and Files pages for certain file types.
    • Changed the character encoding for the JDBC URL from "utf8" to "utf-8".
    • Manage Attachments allows user to delete multiple attachments.

Also Noteworthy

June's Newsletter Contributors

Editor: Linda Bernal
Contributors: Eric Boutilier, Bonnie Corwin, Tim Foster, Jim Grisanzio, Sridhar Muppalla

OpenSolaris Newsletter: September 2006

Overview

In September, OpenSolaris community members presented to developer audiences at conferences in China, Japan, Belgium, and the U.S., and also at user groups in India, Venezuela, Australia, and the U.S. On the site, new projects continue to be opened, code continues to be integrated, documentation continues to be released, and OpenSolaris technology continues to win awards.

Quote of the Month

 Sun took the bold step of open sourcing its crown jewel, Solaris, to take the "proprietary" millstone from around its neck. Now Solaris is the only one of the Big Three Unixes that is open source.  - Tom Yager, InfoWorld, 9/13/06

Community News

The OpenSolaris community is generating a substantial amount of news. To keep track of what's going on, bookmark these links: OpenSolaris Announcements, OpenSolaris in the News, OpenSolaris Tags on Delicious, and OpenSolaris Blogs. Also, Eric Boutilier and Glynn Foster publish regular summaries:

Projects & Communities

Conferences

Contributions to Consolidation Code

  • There were two code contributions put back into OpenSolaris via the request-sponsor program in September, bringing the total to 122.
  • Thanks to Rainer Orth and Chris Kimber for ON bug fixes. Also thanks to Sun ON engineers for sponsoring the code through to putback: Pete Dennis and Minskey Guo.
  • You can see all the code contributors, their sponsors, and the bugs fixed in the code contributor report.

User Groups

  • The NIT Warangal OpenSolaris User Group held a meeting on Sept. 6th, Scott Dickson presented on ZFS.
  • The Seattle OpenSolaris User Group met for the first time on Sept. 6th at the OpenSolaris World Tour. Topic of discussion was meeting logistics moving forward.
  • The Moscow OpenSolaris User Group met on Sept. 7th to discuss ZFS, and on Sept. 28th Alexander Kolbasov presented about NUMA support in Solaris.
  • The Venezuela OpenSolaris User Group met on September 8th. An OpenSolaris interview was conducted with Nelson Bocaranda.
  • The Atlanta User Group held a meeting on Sept. 12th. The topic for this meeting was DTrace Toolkit. Ryan Matteson, of Earthlink, presented.
  • The Sweden OpenSolaris User Group held a meeting on Sept. 13th. Kjell Hogstrom presented Networks Improvements in Solaris 10 and Nevada and gave an introduction on OpenSolaris. Lars Tunkrans presented OpenSolaris Installation and Compilation.
  • The Madurai User Group met for the first time on September 20th. A brainstorm session was held on "How to take OpenSolaris ahead in the future."
  • The Sydney User Group met on September 21st. The focus of this meeting was informal conversation about what people are currently working on of interest.
  • The Bangalore User Group met on September 23rd, which featured BeleniX booting off a USB stick and a discussion on Branded Zones/Solaris Containers for Linux Applications.
  • The Front Range OpenSolaris User Group (FROSUG) in Colorado held a meeting on September 26th. Lisa Week presented information about pNFS, a new protocol extension to NSFv4 allows separation of an NFS file system's data and metadata paths.
  • The Silicon Valley User Group met on September 28th. Two talks were presented: Sun Studio Tools and Trusted Solaris.
  • Several new user groups opened on the site this month: The Netherlands; Madurai; Columbus, Ohio; and  Shanghai
  • Links to user groups, lists, and leaders here.

Distributions

Technical Status

New Components

  • The Brandz Project integrated into ON Build 49 on September 11th.
  • C++ runtime libraries in SUNWlibC that C++ applications require to run were made available in binary form here on September 26th.
  • The Documentation consolidation released source for three more books on September 29th. See the Docs download page for detail.
    • Application Packaging Developer's Guide
    • DTrace User Guide
    • Solaris Trusted Extensions Administrator's Procedures

SCM Work

  • Milestones for SCM work are updated.
  • The Companion CD project made a test Subversion (SVN) repository available on September 7th for Beta testing.
  • The ON test Mercurial repository, targeted for availability in early September, was delayed again.

Also Noteworthy

September's Newsletter Contributors

Editor: Linda Bernal
Contributors: Bonnie Corwin, Jim Grisanzio

OpenSolaris Newsletter: October 2006

Overview

Some critical infrastructure work came to fruition in October around the implementation of the Mercurial (in Beta) and Subversion (generally available) source code management systems. Also, code contributions continue to be integrated, projects continue to open, and the community continues to break records for forum conversations. OpenSolaris distributions are driving positive press coverage, user groups are opening and meeting around the world, and in China even more universities are incorporating OpenSolaris in computer science courses. We even updated the website and released new components and source code. As months go, this was a pretty good one.

Quotes of the Month

"OpenSolaris evangelism is now a full time job." Ben Rockwood

"OpenSolaris represents the direct continuation of a strategy that has proven itself since Ken Thompson first sent a Unix tape to a colleague at Berkeley … " Paul Murphy

"Nexenta is shaping up to be a very interesting operating system." Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier

Community News

News Summaries

Jive Discussion Forum Data

  • Conversations on the 152 OpenSolaris Jive discussion forums continue to thrive in multiple areas. During the last two months the total views and unique visitors to the forums have increased consistently and have achieved new records. The total views to the forums now top 7 million and the total unique visitors now top 4.6 million. The number of threads and messages are also increasing with August, September, and October all being record months for the number of threads posted and September being a record month for total messages posted.

Projects & Communities

  • One project was open in October: Solaris Power PC Port, which included a major release of code from Sun Labs on October 3rd.
  • Four new projects were proposed in October: OpenSolaris Ports System, ipv4 over ipv6 Tunneling, smf-doc, and ON Tool Hg Conversion.
  • OpenSolaris now has 48 open projects with another 19 that are approved but not yet opened.

Conferences

Contributions to Consolidation Code

  • There were 8 code contributions put back into OpenSolaris via the request-sponsor program in October, bringing the total to 132.
  • Thanks to Pawel Dawidek, Ricardo Correia, Rich Lowe, Rainer Orth, Garrett D'Amore, Juergen Keil and Shawn Walker for ON bug fixes. Also thanks to Sun ON engineers for sponsoring the code through to putback: Noel Dellafano, Matt Ahrens, Steve Lau, Eric Lowe, Frank Hofmann and Dan Mick.
  • You can see all the code contributors, their sponsors, and the bugs fixed in the code contributor report.

User Groups

There are now 42 user groups in the OpenSolaris User Group Community. 

  • The Indonesia OpenSolaris User Group met on October 4. Photos here.
  • The NIT Warangal OpenSolaris User Group met on October 11th. Sameer Seth gave a technical talk on "TCP/IP on Solaris".
  • The Columbus, Ohio OpenSolaris User Group opened on October 11th.
  • The London OpenSolaris User Group met on October 18th. Darren Moffat gave a technical talk on OpenSolaris Security.
  • The Korea OpenSolaris User Group opened on October 20th.
  • The Czech OpenSolaris User Group held its eleventh meeting on October 21st. It was an all-day event focused on operating systems virtualization technologies, namely Xen running on OpenSolaris.
  • The Front Range OpenSolaris User Group in Colorado met on October 24th. Bill Knoche spoke about "Porting Linux Applications to Solaris", and Jon Bowman gave an "OpenSolaris Update".
  • The Nihon Sun User Group met in Tokyo on October 24th to hear Hajime Akashi present Solaris SNS. Photos here.
  • The first meeting of the Dutch OpenSolaris User Group was held on October 26th. Bart Muijzer introduced the meeting; Casper Dik introduced OpenSolaris; Darren Moffat spoke about OpenSolaris development and encryption for ZFS; and Remco Fugers introduced the OpenSolaris Starter Kit.
  • The Silicon Valley OpenSolaris User Group met on October 26th. Erik Nordmark spoke on IP Instances, and Sangeeta Misra did a short presentation about the Surya project.
  • The Bangalore OpenSolaris User Group met on October 28th to discuss device drivers.
  • The Japanese OpenSolaris User Group formed with a new list (ug-jposug) on October 30th.

Distributions

Technical Status

New Components

SCM Work: Subversion

  • External Subversion (SVN) beta ended on October 6th.
  • General Subversion (SVN) availability was announced on October 11th.
  • The Live JDS repository became available on October 19th.

SCM Work: Mercurial

SCM Work: General

Website

  • Derek Cicero announced a new version of the opensolaris.org application on October 25th. Public-facing changes include the following. For the full list of changes and detail, see Derek's email.
  • Project/Community Leader Changes
    • Hidden pages cause an object-not-found error based on user authorization. Additionally, hidden pages will appear in the navigation and site map if user is authorized to edit them.
    • Replaced textarea for media types with multi-select on Edit (Site|Project|Community).
    • Moved "Add Feed" link to top of Manage Blog Feeds page.
    • Added Author attribute to Announcements.
    • Added Most Recent Blogs page (updated look of blogs page).
    • Added "This page is hidden" message to pages other than "standard" page.
    • Changed upload handler to disallow unknown file extensions.
    • Added client-side validation to Add Attachment.
  • Other Changes
    • Added "List by Extension" display to Manage Media Types.
    • Altered bug report email to include the submitter in the CC list.
    • Added logic to prevent deletion of media types that are in use.
    • Added logic to prevent duplicate extensions in Manage Media Types.
    • Created new feature: Re-assign Media Type.
    • Fixed bug: Project Short Name uniqueness validation error is also reported as Title validation error.
    • Fixed bug: URL of Announcements page is incorrect in RSS feed.
  • Changes in Jive
    • Added logic to limit the number of forums to which a message can be CC'd. (The limit is four.)

Also Noteworthy

October's Newsletter Contributors

Editor: Linda Bernal
Contributors: Eric Boutilier, Bonnie Corwin, Jim Grisanzio, Muppalla Sridhar

OpenSolaris Newsletter: November 2006

Overview

The OpenSolaris community participated in multiple global events in November and set new records for discussions back at home on opensolaris.org. New components were released, several new projects were proposed, and a new community and new project opened.

Quotes of the Month

"Sun’s Moinak Ghosh is famed in the community for Belenix, an open source project to compress the 1.8-gigabyte Sun Solaris operating system to fit onto a 700-megabyte compact disc." - Red Herring, 11/24/06

"This is my first open source project and my first experience with Unix. I'm happy with the outcome and encouraged by Moinak's support." - Anil Gulecha in the Times of India, 11/22/06

Community News

News Summaries

Jive Discussion Forum Data

Projects & Communities

Conferences: Seoul, Prague, Bangalore

  • The OpenSolaris World Tour stopped in Seoul and Prague in November, and hundreds of developers gathered for a variety of technical presentations and events. Sun gave away three Ultra 20s as well. For details of upcoming OpenSolaris Days, check the OpenSolaris events page.
  • The OpenSolaris World Tour stopped in Seoul and Prague in November, and hundreds of developers gathered for a variety of technical presentations on OpenSolaris. For details of upcoming events, check the OpenSolaris events page.
  • OpenSolaris participated in {link;FOSS.IN in Bangalore|http://foss.in/2006/info/Main_Page} in November, and the conference was a major success. For summaries, including lists of bloggers who were there, go here, here,here, and here.

Contributions to Consolidation Code

  • There were four code contributions put back into OpenSolaris via the request-sponsor program in November, bringing the total to 136.
  • Thanks to Peter Tribble, Garrett D'Amore, Richard Hamilton and Jean-Paul Degabriele for ON bug fixes. Also thanks to Sun ON engineers for sponsoring the code through to putback: Rich Brown, Carol Fields, Dan Groves, Craig Mohrman and Dan McDonald.
  • You can see all the code contributors, their sponsors, and the bugs fixed in the code contributor report.

User Groups

  • The Indonesia OpenSolaris User Group met on Nov 8th.
  • The Moscow OpenSolaris User Group (MOSUG) met on Nov 9th for a session on DTrace.
  • The Atlanta OpenSolaris User Group (ATLOSUG) met on Nov 11th in Alpharetta, Georgia to talk about open source projects related to OpenSolaris.
  • The Czech OpenSolaris User Group (CZOSUG) participated in the Sun Tech Days OpenSolaris Day event on Nov 14th in Prague.
  • The London OpenSolaris User Group met on November 15th. Gavin Maltby gave a presentation on Fault Management Architecture (FMA).
  • The Front Range User Group (FROSUG) met on November 28th. Susan Kamm-Worrell and Tony Nguyen talked about the Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF). In addition to the SMF presentation, Jon Bowman gave an "OpenSolaris Update" - a short presentation about the latest happenings in OpenSolaris.
  • The Silicon Valley User Group (SVOSUG) held a meeting on November 30th. A Power Management presentation was given by David Brown and Randy Fishell.
  • The Argentina OpenSolaris User Group met on Nov 30 at the Universidad del Salvador in Buenos Aries. Meeting details and photos are all at the AOSUG page. This is the first meeting of the AOSUG, which was created recently by Hernan Saltiel.

Distributions

  • BeleniX 0.5.1 was available for download on Nov 25th.
  • Links to all OpenSolaris distributions on the downloads page.

Sun Contributor Agreement

  • A new version (1.3) of the Sun Contributor Agreement was made available on November 9th. This version includes two small changes:
  • Separate line items for "Full Name" and "Company Name"
  • Separate line to print the name of the person signing the agreement.
  • These changes are to make it more straightforward for companies to submit SCAs. A company can list contributors in the "Full Name" section; if that section is left blank, all employees of the company can contribute. The line to print the name of the person who signs the agreement is, of course, redundant in the case of an individual contributor. But when a company signs, this will be the name of the executive who signs (since the "Full Name" section will list contributors or be blank).
  • And there is now an SCA FAQ available.

Technical Status

New Components

  • The Documentation consolidation released source for four more books on November 30th. See the Docs download page for detail.
    • Solaris Express Installation Guide: Custom JumpStart and Advanced Installations
    • Solaris Express Installation Guide: Planning for Installation and Upgrade
    • Solaris Tunable Parameters Reference Manual
    • System Administration Guide: Security Services

SCM Work: Subversion

SCM Work: General

  • The SCM Migration Project was opened and information added about tools and planned work. In addition, source for additional tools was posted on November 29th.
  • Join the discussion on tools-discuss if you are interested and would like to help out.

Website

Also Noteworthy

  • There are many new OpenSolaris participants for Sun's Campus Ambassador program in China. See Joey Guo for the latest information and photos.

October's Newsletter Contributors

Editor: Linda Bernal
Contributors: Bonnie Corwin, Jim Grisanzio, Eric Boutilier

OpenSolaris Newsletter: December 2006/January 2007

Overview

The OpenSolaris Community started 2007 with a bang as the community broke new records for conversations even before engaging in a massive thread about future licensing options. Additionally, new components on the project were opened, and the community continued to meet within user groups and at conferences, and two new conferences have been set for February in Germany and India.

Quote of the Month

We want to make it easier for developers to not only work on OpenSolaris but to also develop applications on top of OpenSolaris. Getting more people to participate and making it easier for developers to start developing on Sun Solaris is the key thing we're focusing on. Stephen Harpster, Director of Open Source Engineering at Sun Microsystems, quoted in internet.com, 1/10/07.

Community News

News Summaries

Jive Discussion Forum Data

    • For January: Total Web Views: 1,041,476, Unique Visitors: 888,206, Total Threads: 1,736, Total Messages: 7,580.
    • From launch 20 months ago: Total Web Views: 10,147,246, Unique Visitors: 7,244,1930, Total Threads: 21,152, Total Messages: 20,675
  • Registrations to opensolaris.org doubled for the month of January bringing the total to 21,099.
  • More OpenSolaris Community metrics in the marketing community.

Projects & Communities

Conferences:

  • OpenSolaris Day at Sun Tech Days was held on January 16th, in Atlanta. You can download all presentations here.
  • Abstracts for the German Unix User Group's OpenSolaris Developer Conference at the end of February have been posted.
  • Abstracts have been posted for an OpenSolaris Day conference in India in February.

Contributions to Consolidation Code

  • There were 4 code contributions put back into OpenSolaris via the request-sponsor program in December, bringing the total to 141.
  • Thanks to Juergen Keil and Garrett D'Amore for bug fixes. Also thanks to Sun ON engineers for sponsoring the code through to putback: Jan Setje-Eilers, Carol Fields and Minskey Guo.
  • There were 3 code contributions put back into OpenSolaris in January, bringing the total to 144.
  • Thanks to Stephen Potter, Rich Lowe and Bruce Shaw for the ON bug fixes. A thanks to the ON Sun engineers for sponsoring the code through to putback: Stephen Lau, Sarah Jelinek and Dan Groves.
  • You can see all the code contributors, their sponsors, and the bugs fixed in the code contributor report

User Groups

  • The Czech OpenSolaris User Group met on Dec. 13th. Zdenek Burda spoke about Containers, their administration, and his experiences with this technology, and Jiri Cervenka spoke about Mercurial, how it works, and how to work with it and why.
  • The FROSUG (Front Range OpenSolaris User Group) met on Dec. 14th. This was a social meeting held at the Splitz bowling center in Westminster. FROSUG met again on Jan. 25th. Chris McDonald presented Solaris Training, Jerry Jelinek presented presented OpenSolaris Zones and Jon Bowman gave an OpenSolaris update.
  • The SVOSUG (Silicon Valley OpenSolaris User Group) got together on Dec. 21st and held a Holiday Installfest. SVOSUG met again on Jan. 25th, Ben Rockwood talked about "Why Joyent doesn't fsck".
  • The NLOSUG (Netherlands OpenSolaris User Group)met on Jan 25th. Bart Muijzer gave an update on the NLOSUG, Peter van Gemert presented what's new in Solaris 10 11/06 and beyond, and Paul van den Bogaard offered a DTrace case study.
  • The NEOSUG (New England Opensolaris User Group) met for the first time on Jan. 31st. Topics on the agenda included an introduction to the OpenSolaris project and a technical update on the most recent build.

Technical Status

New Components

  • The Man Page consolidation published source for an initial set of 356 man pages on Dec. 11th. Download.
  • The ON Test team published source for the NFSv4 Test Suite was released on Dec. 18th. Download. You can view in the source browser here
  • The DevPro Consolidation made source for SCCS and make available on Dec. 19th. Download
  • The Globalization Consolidation made source for OS locales and system libraries (non-translation source) available on Dec. 22nd. "From developers to students, from translators to writers, there's a way to contribute to OpenSolaris.org. Help us create excellent reference material to OpenSolaris by translating terms and the definitions in this glossary! - Young Joo Pintaske Download
  • The Man Page consolidation published source for a second set of 2790 man pages on Jan. 26th. Download.

SCM Work: General

  • Mercurial 0.9.3 became available at the end of December with rename support which is support needed by the OpenSolaris project.
  • The end of the site beta for Mercurial on opensolaris.org pushed out due to the Mercurial release happening later than expected and due to some operational problems encountered in the website support.
  • New dates for the end of the site beta and the move of the ON consolidation to Mercurial will be available in early February.

December/January's Newsletter Contributors

 Editor: Linda Bernal
 Contributors: Bonnie Corwin, Jim Grisanzio, Young Joo Pintaske, Linda Bernal
 How to Contribute: The OpenSolaris Newsletter is a community effort, and all community members are welcome to participate. Simply send news items to program-team mail list or the opensolaris-discuss mail list. The editor will keep track of contributions and list the names of participants in each issue. Also, the editorial team is looking for feedback on the content and format of the newsletter, so please feel free to suggest changes.

last modified by admin on 2009/10/26 12:07
 
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