Feature Spot Archive
This page is an archive of Feature Spots. To suggest a features spot, send mail to website dash discuss at opensolaris dot org.
October 20- November 16
Welcome to the New OpenSolaris.org Wiki
The OpenSolaris Website Community migrated opensolaris.org to XWiki on October 26th, 2009 completing phase 2 of the transition. The Transition FAQ includes answers to your questions.
October 10- October 19
Feature Spot: Security Group Sponsors Summit 
The OpenSolaris Security Summit is sponsored by the OpenSolaris Security Community Group and is planned for Tuesday November 3rd, 2009 in Baltimore, Maryland. It is scheduled to run during LISA '09 which runs from November 1-6. Please join the summit to hear about security in large system installations from technical leaders, customers, and community members. Register now for this free event!
William Cheswick of AT&T Labs - Research will provide the keynote. Ches is an early innovator in Internet security, best known for the book he co-authored with Steve Bellovin and now Avi Rubin, Firewalls and Internet Security; Repelling the Wily Hacker.
September 4- October 9
Feature Spot: OpenSolaris Documentation
 | Contribute to the OpenSolaris documentation community. |
 | Download and/or redistribute OpenSolaris documentation. |
 | Find info on how to set up and develop on OpenSolaris. |
August 1- September 3
Feature Spot: Website Phase 1 Integration Complete
The OpenSolaris Web Community delivers phase 1 of the infrastructure transition on the opensolaris.org site. A description of the phases for the transition is available. The roadmap includes more details about the phase 1 updates to SCM Console, improvements to bugs.opensolaris.org and implementation of the new user authentication application.
Validate Your OpenSolaris.org Account
The first time you log in to opensolaris.org after August 3, you will see a screen at http://auth.opensolaris.org where you'll be instructed to validate your account. Note: If you do not validate your account within three months, your account will be inactivated.
Join Web Community Meetings
Meetings of the Web Community will be held using conference calls every other Thursday at 9am PDT beginning July 30 to answer your questions. The Web Community published the Site Transition FAQ and User Action FAQ to answer common questions.
July 25- July 31
Feature Spot: Project Boomer Delivers Next Generation Sound Sub-System
The OpenSolaris Boomer Project delivered a new sound sub-system to OpenSolaris in build 115. Boomer (PSARC 2008/318) is the next generation audio sub-system for Solaris.
The Boomer project is sponsored by the Device Drivers Community. It provides greater support for advanced audio hardware (5.1, 7.1, high definition audio) as well as greater programming interface support for the latest audio applications.
Boomer supports all current Sun audio hardware, and supports the legacy Sun audio(7I) API, as well as the Open Sound System API.
June 1- July 24
Feature Spot: Projects Unite to Deliver OpenSolaris 2009.06 
OpenSolaris 2009.06 is now available for deployment from the desktop to datacenter, check out the latest features:
» Network Virtualization with Crossbow
» Turn any host into a SCSI target with COMSTAR
» Host virtual guests using xVM Hypervisor or LDoms
» SPARC® support for Distro Constructor, Auto Install, and Snap
» Intel Xeon 5500 processor support with deep power management
» MySQL and PHP DTrace Probes in the WebStack
» Improved usability of the package management system
» ZFS Time Slider Snapshot Management
» Contribute new applications with SourceJuicer
» Get 24/7 support with OpenSolaris Subscriptions
May 23- May 31
Feature Spot: CommunityOne West Developer Conference
The OpenSolaris community will gather at CommunityOne West the week of June 1st, 2009 at Moscone Center in San Francisco, California. To kick off the week, the Open HA Cluster Summit, sponsored by the OpenSolaris HA Clusters Group is planned for Sunday, May 31st.
Monday, June 1st, learn the latest OpenSolaris technologies by attending free talks about Managing OpenSolaris, Porting Applications, and Developing on OpenSolaris. Join the OGB Townhall Monday evening, just before the big party.
Tuesday, June 2nd, will be an entire day of OpenSolaris deep dives, including ZFS ninja training from the experts. Register using the code OSDDT to attend the deep dives for free.
Wednesday, June 3rd, OpenSolaris User Group Leaders from around the world will gather for an entire day of bootcamp to learn together.
May 2nd- May 22
Feature Spot: HA Clusters Group Sponsors Summit
The Open HA Cluster Summit is sponsored by the OpenSolaris HA Clusters Group and is planned for May 31st, 2009 in San Francisco, California.
Stanford University's Dr. David Cheriton will present the keynote: The Network is the Cluster.
Explore the latest trends of High Availability Cluster technologies, as well as key insights from HA Clusters community members, technologists, and users of High Availability and Business Continuity software. Register for this free event, sign up for the community marketplace and enjoy free food and casino games!
April 6th- May 1st
Feature Spot: Harry Foxwell and Christine Tran author Pro OpenSolaris 
Pro OpenSolaris by Harry J Foxwell PhD and Christine Tran is set to be published April 29th, 2009.
This 275-page book is for Linux system administrators and programmers.
- Discover the secrets of the ZFS, the most powerful file system ever conceived.
- Explore OpenSolaris AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP).
- Familiarize yourself with the new security administration features of OpenSolaris, including changes in DTrace.
Buy the alpha eBook today or pre-order the soft-cover book! You can also contribute to the OpenSolaris Lending Project with your purchase.
March 25th- April 5th
Feature Spot: Fully Open X Project
The OpenSolaris FOX Project is endorsed by the X Window Group.
The project provides a common source base for distros to build from. The FOX mercurial repository is populated with Makefiles for all of the Xorg modules available so that the whole wad is buildable on Nevada.
Most recently, the SPARC/Xorg hardware compatibility matrix was developed. The FOX Project is led by Alan Coopersmith, Martin Bochnig, Moinak Gosh, and Jay Cotton.
Join in the developer conversation on the xwin-discuss mailing list. Sign up for notifications of commits or see archives of commit messages on fox-notify.
March 6th- March 24th
Feature Spot: OGB Election 2009
The OpenSolaris Governing Board annual election voting is now in progress. For candidate statements, review the election web page.
Voter Instructions
To submit your ballot, refer to the complete instructions for how to vote using poll.opensolaris.org and if you are on SWAN, refer to the recent Proxy announcement.
Join the Annual Meeting of Members
The 2009 Annual Meeting of OpenSolaris members is currently in-progress on the #opensolaris-meeting channel on the FreeNode IRC network. Join in for live Q&A.
February 25-March 5
Feature: Tesla Project Delivers PowerTOP for OpenSolaris
The OpenSolaris Tesla Project is endorsed by the Power Management Group. Join in the developer conversation on the #pm-dev freenode channel and on the PM discusson forum.
In addition to integration of PowerTop into OpenSolaris, the Tesla Project is working on CPU power management, PM Observability with DTrace and a Tickless Kernel Architecture.
Watch the Tesla YouTube Channel for an overview by Rafael Vanoni and check out Intel Dave entering a PowerTOP video game!
February 14- February 24
Feature Spot: Storage Summit 
The OpenSolaris Storage Summit is the brainchild of the Storage Group.
» Join the free, all-day event in San Francisco, Monday, February 23rd. Experience keynote speaker Mike Shapiro and presenter Ben Rockwood for his ZFS in the Trenches talk.
Register to attend the sessions, join remotely on UStream for a live streaming broadcast, or follow the happenings on twitter.
February 7- February 13
Feature Spot: Solter, Jelinek, and Miner author OpenSolaris Bible 
The first English-language book on OpenSolaris, OpenSolaris Bible, is set to be published on February 17th.
This book will show you how to become a power user by maximizing the abilities of advanced features like DTrace, the fault management architecture, ZFS, the service management facility, and Zones.
The book was authored by OpenSolaris HA-Clusters Group leader Nicholas Solter, Dave Miner who leads the Installation & Packaging Group, and Zones Group leader Jerry Jelinek.
Pre-order your copy today and enjoy reading the PDF excerpts from the Table of Contents, Chapter 1, and the Index in the meantime.
January 31-February 6
Feature Spot: Testing Group Opens Farm 
The OpenSolaris Testing Group provides a forum for discussing OpenSolaris test issues and works with developers to ensure quality.
Testing Group leaders are focused on delivering resources to developers including: test suites for ON, HA-Cluster, and White Box, test development repositories, and a self-service testing web application.
Most recently, Jim Walker announced availability of the multi-platform test farm hosted in the US and China.
The test farm provides open resources, matured test suites, and automation -- from resource request to testing within minutes! Reserve a whole root development Zone using the Test Farm Reservation Interface.
January 21-January 30
Feature Spot: Software Porters Group 
The OpenSolaris Software Porters Group coordinates, advocates, encourages, and helps with the porting of software from multiple platforms to the OpenSolaris Platform. It is a community of porters, advocates and advisers that helps people who want to port software.
In conjunction with the Source Juicer and Package Factory projects, Software Porters set up the /pending and /contrib package repositories.
Participate on the sw-porters forum using the pending repo process and the contrib repo process.
Following is an example of how to set authority for an alternative package repository and verify the new setting, see the Get More Packages page for a complete list of package repos.
$ pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib contrib.opensolaris.org
January 10-January 20
Feature Spot: Crossbow Project Delivers Phase 1 of Network Virtualization 
The Crossbow Project integration into build 105 is endorsed by the Networking Group and builds on the GLDv3 framework developed by the Nemo Project.
The Crossbow Project Phase 1 delivery provides the building blocks for network virtualization and resource control by virtualizing the stack and NIC around any service (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, NFS), protocol, or Virtual machine.
Check out the Crossbow Documentation to learn more about planning, configuring and monitoring your virtual network.
Create a VNIC by simply specifying in a single command the priority, CPU, and the B/W limit the poll thread will enforce for packets:
freya(67)% dladm create-vnic -l e1000g0 -p maxbw=100,cpus=2 my_guest_vm
December 25-January 9
Feature Spot: Starfish Project Assists with OpenSolaris Driver and Kernel Development 
The OpenSolaris Source Code Project plug-in is the first delivery from the Starfish Project, endorsed by the Device Driver Group.
The project leverages NetBeans and Sun Studio to help automate downloads of ON source code, environment configuration settings and nightly builds. The plug-in provides templates to help you generate network, scsi hba, and raid driver packages and gives you one-click automated OpenSolaris source code download and build. The GUI environment also includes standardized test suites for qualification and verification of device drivers and kernel modules.
Check out the Demo and the Driver Workshop!
The Starfish Project is led by Ada Feng.
December 2-December 24
Feature Spot: OpenSolaris Projects Unite to Deliver OpenSolaris 2008.11 
The OpenSolaris 2008.11 OS is a point of integration for the installation, desktop, and package management system projects on OpenSolaris.org.
The OpenSolaris 2008.11 LiveCD is now available with the following feature updates:
» ZFS Time Slider and Songbird
» Suspend/Resume and CPU power management
» Distribution Constructor and Prototype Automated Installer
» WebStack with 64-bit MySQL, CherryPy, and DTrace for Ruby
» GNOME 2.24, OpenOffice 3.0, and Firefox 3
» Many F/OSS apps added, including top, sudo and emacs
» 700 additional man pages and Package Manager online help
November 26-December 1
Feature Spot: JDS Project Develops ZFS Time Slider 
The ZFS Time Slider UI is the most recent delivery from the JDS Project, endorsed by the Desktop Group. Browse the source and specs here.
The UI uses SMF services to determine when and which ZFS filesystem to snapshot based on a set schedule, so you can backup and restore files safely and efficiently!
The ZFS Time Slider development was led by Erwann Chénedé, Tim Foster, Niall Power, Calum Benson, and Jaime Guerrero.
November 19-November 26
Feature Spot: MilaX minimal Live Distribution Project 
The OpenSolaris MilaX Project develops a small size Live CD distribution which runs completely off a CD or a USB pendrive.
» MilaX 0.3.2 SPARC was delivered last month and is based on snv_98 with added missing virtual drivers so you can boot the MilaX ISO in a Guest LDom.
» MilaX 0.3.2 Small Desktop 32bit version, based on Nevada 95, was released in September and includes Beaver, Gtk-Terminal, Vim, Netsurf, Sylpheed, Midnight Commander, emelFM, XMMS, Epdfview, VNC viewer, Rdesktop, Nmap, gFTP, gPicview, Conky, XChat, Xpad, Transmission and other utilities.
The MilaX project is led by contributors Michal Bielicki, Alexander R. Eremin and Evgeni Ilyin.
November 7-November 18
Feature Spot: phpEasyTools for OpenSolaris 
The OpenSolaris EasyTools Project develops tools in PHP to manage OpenSolaris in a web environment. This tool will help you learn OpenSolaris because it displays the commands that are run from the web interface.
» The initial beta delivery of the EasySMF download was released in July. The project has already delivered a follow-on beta of the EasyRM download for simple resource management.
The EasyTools OpenSolaris project is led by our friends David Galán Ortiz and Jose Juan Mora Perez who also work hard on the Cayac WebStack for OpenSolaris and the OpenSolaris Hispano project.
October 29-November 7
Feature Spot: DTrace Chime Visualization Tool 
The OpenSolaris DTrace Chime Project delivers a GUI for DTrace aggregations giving you the ability to visually display system data over time including moving averages. The GUI provides wizards for easily adding custom data displays, without re-compiling.
» The most recent installable Chime package was released on October 21, 2008.
The DTrace Chime project is endorsed by the OpenSolaris DTrace Group and uses some of the most popular one-liners from the DTraceToolkit, a collection of useful documented scripts developed by the OpenSolaris DTrace community.
October 15-October28
Feature Spot: OpenSolaris Developer Conference in Szczecin, Poland
Join the OpenSolaris developer conference on October 24th and 25th in Szczecin, Poland. The conference will be in English and located at the Pazim complex in the city center.
The main goal of the conference is to present the OpenSolaris operating system and its parent, Sun Solaris 10 Operating System to a greater audience in Poland. Refer to the conference web site for the detailed schedule and registration form.
October 4-October 14
Feature Spot: Distro Meetup 
September 27-October 3
Feature Spot: Web Stack Project 
The OpenSolaris Web Stack Project is a part of the SFW Consolidation that is focused on web tier technologies.
Easily install the amp-dev package with the pfexec pkg install amp-dev command or by using the Package Manager GUI.
For documentation, refer to the Web Stack Getting Started Guide and How To Set Up Your OpenSolaris AMP Environment.
Start using the OpenSolaris Web Stack tools for developing and deploying web applications today!
September 13-September 26
Feature Spot: Storage Summit 
The OpenSolaris Storage Summit is the brainchild of the Storage Group.
» Next Sunday, Sept. 21st, join the free, all-day event and experience keynote speakers Ben Rockwood and Mike Shapiro.
Register to attend the sessions and evening reception with live music and an island theme.
September 6-September 12
Feature Spot: Nightingale Project 
The Nightingale project is the playground of developers porting Songbird, the cross-platform media player that 'plays the web' to OpenSolaris. The project is endorsed by the Desktop Group.
» Last week, thanks to the efforts of Alfred, the tarball build for x86 was made available. It's made on Alfred's box with Solaris Nevada 93, Sun Studio 12.
Jim Grisanzio took this picture of the Nightingale Project Leaders at the OpenSolaris Developer's Summit last May.
August 30-September 5
Feature Spot: ON Code Stars
The ON/Nevada project sponsors and endorses the integrations and activities of OpenSolaris Operating System and Networking component developers.
» This week, we recognize and applaud three OpenSolaris Contributors, who have shown extreme dedication to the project by contributing more than 10 --and in some cases more than 50-- integrations to the Nevada code line. Thank you Jürgen Keil (SMF, Device Drivers, OGB and OS/Net Groups), Rainer Orth (Tools and OS/Net Groups), and Peter Tribble (Installation and Packaging Group and Systems Administration Group).
These are only a few notable engineers in our community, see the complete list of contributors, sponsors, and in-progress fixes to ON code.
August 22-29, 2008
Feature Spot: OpenSolaris User Groups
The Advocacy Community endorses the proposals and activities of global OpenSolaris User Groups. Jim Grisanzio, Advocacy Facilitator, took this photo at a Tokyo2Point0 meeting recently.
» This week, OpenSolaris User Group meetings will take place in China, Australia, Germany, Indonesia, and the US in Broomfield and San Francisco, just to name a few. We have 70 active user groups around the world today, find your local group or start your own.
August 14-21, 2008
Feature Spot: Korn Shell 93
The ksh93-integration project investigates and executes the integration of ksh93 and related features into OpenSolaris.
» This week, the project engineers posted i386 and SPARC tarballs for installation on an existing OpenSolaris build 84 platform to provide ksh93t_20080725 for testing and evaluation purposes. 11 new demos are included, check out the GNAW (ksh93 PacMan clone).
August 1-13, 2008
This month: What can ZFS do for you?
Join the ZFS developers in open discussions to learn about innovations in data storage.