Life is so good, it gets better every day

For those people who like living on the bleeding edge of development, you can now update your system to include the latest builds coming out of the OpenSolaris sausage factory. Alan has been posting updates on indiana-discuss when they are available. Those who have been used to SXCE should be pretty comfortable updating, and both IPS, ZFS and beadm have made this a breeze.

The current update is build 91, and here’s the steps to clone your ZFS file-system, and download the latest packages -

# Refresh the package catalog
gman@rampage:~$ pfexec pkg refresh
# Install an updated version of SUNWipkg (which avoids a few bugs)
gman@rampage:~$ pfexec pkg install pkg:/SUNWipkg@0.5.11,0.5.11-0.86
# Refresh the package catalog again (to get fixed up content)
gman@rampage:~$ pfexec pkg refresh
# Image Update for the win! (sit back and watch the progress)
gman@rampage:~$ pfexec pkg image-update
# Now you need to ensure to active your new boot environment (temporary step)
gman@rampage:~$ pfexec mount -F zfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris-1 /mnt
gman@rampage:~$ pfexec /mnt/boot/solaris/bin/update_grub -R /mnt
# Now reboot and enjoy!

In the works is build 92, that should be available in a week or so - including GNOME 2.22. Hopefully by the time 2008.11 rocks around, we’ll have 2.24 included!

Tomorrow, Thursday 19th June at 2pm PT, Tim Cramer is hosting an OpenSolaris Planning Meeting to help plan the OpenSolaris 2008.11 release. We have a whole bunch of local freephone numbers for this call (see list), and hopefully will have a SIP bridge, to allow everyone to participate. Come join in the fun, and help us to set the right set of priorities for 2008.11, and point out what things we should be doing differently!

Like Jim, I figured I might as well post this on my blog. Over the last month and a half, the OGB have been pondering the current OpenSolaris community structure, and that laid out in the constitution, in terms of how (if desired) we can simplify things and not only match reality, but lay rest to 3 years of confusion. Here’s my strawman on the possible roles or structures

Roles

OGB

OpenSolaris Governing Board member. Voted in by the OpenSolaris membership. Board members should monitor a selection of high level areas and be a point of contact, so as to broadly cover the activities of the community. Secretary may be an existing board member, or a non-voting board elected representative.

Member

A person who has contributed non-trivially to a related project or activity within the OpenSolaris Community. A person may apply for membership at any stage, listing their achievements and at least one referrencing Member who can vouch for them. Membership is for life, but expires after 2 years. All current Members have the opportunity of voting in the annual board elections.

Project Lead

A person who has commit privileges to an existing project, and can grant others commit privileges based on recognition of their contributions. A project lead also has the responsibility of deciding the direction (technical or otherwise) of projects among their peer co-maintainers, along with the responsibility of representing the opinions and feedback of those who have an interest in the code ie. predominantly users. Successful project leaders are those that can study the marketplace and make decisions that are right for it, and right for the long term well-being. As projects succeed, and interest is garnered, Groups form around those projects. Projects are orphaned when so little interest is gathered to maintain its lifeblood. Project leads may enlist regular contributors to share the day to day maintenance of the project.

Groups

SIG

A SIG, or special interest group, is a selection of people who gather around a specific technology to share experiences, tips and tricks or participate in contributing towards its development. A SIG would typically include project leads, direct and indirect contributors.

Release Team

A selection of people across different disciplines (usually project leads and program managers) who are responsible for organizing the software release schedule, and producing timely releases of the OpenSolaris OS.

ARC

The Architectural Review Committee are a body responsible for ensuring the technical and architectural correctness of the software pieces that make up the OpenSolaris OS through guidance based on their collective experience in dealing with software projects. The group may be sub-divided into full members, and those working towards full membership ie. interns.

Site Administration

A small set of people responsible for the site infrastructure on opensolaris.org - everything from the web application itself, wikis, blogs, planets, SCM hosting, authentication and grant databases, and overall general health of the machines that run this infrastructure. Content is usually generated by other groups within the community, but the site administrators may work with or be responsible for certain parts of the website from time to time.

User Group

A selection of OpenSolaris advocates that are locally distributed, who may meet in person, or virtually, to discuss the technology that makes up the OpenSolaris OS. Their meetings may involve learning about new or existing technology in the OpenSolaris OS, or taking part in wider events such as related technology conferences world to help spread the love of the technology they use on a daily basis.

Random Rationale

• Try to split out governance of the code, from governance of the community
• Code governance is a meritocracy
• The people who write the code, come up with the rules for that code
  • License Choice
  • Coding Style
  • Development Process
  • Versioning
  • Technical Direction
• The people who write the code are the Project Leads, and they are responsible for caring for the long term well-being
  • Who gets to commit
  • Encouraging contributions
  • Technical and architectural correctness
  • Responsibility of listening to their users
  • Enlisting regular contributors to share the maintenance load
• If they are responsible enough, groups will gather around that code, and the project will be considered a success
• If they do not show that responsibility (or many other factors), the project will be orphaned and/or die
• All projects are different by their nature, and we shouldn’t try to artificially enforce the same principles, rules and processes behind them all
  • Different reasons for its creation
  • Different sets of people contributing
• Ideas are the building blocks of our community, and they (generally) take the form of projects
  • Those willing to take an idea to implementation could be considered as project leads
  • The people who do the work, get to decide the direction of the project

Joe mailed me a couple of days ago saying that he’s hiring about 10 engineers for desktop sustaining in Bangalore (and, no doubt, time to do development if the queues are low). If you’re interested, drop him a mail with your resume!

It seems a blur since we were all at the Moscone center releasing OpenSolaris 2008.05, and everything leading up to the big event. Jim has a great set of pictures from the event. Now the long slog to produce a similarly rocking release for November has started in earnest.

Fortunately I managed to get some vacation to charge up the batteries with a 3 week vacation in Europe that started with a couple of days around San Francisco with Jayne (and buying an iPhone so we had a camera with us), then over to Barcelona to see my beautiful sister getting married (and the lively Spanish reception and welcome) and a tour around the wonderful sites of Barcelona. From there, across to an insanely wet Rome for a couple of days, and up to the beautiful Florence, where I took the opportunity of proposing to Jayne (she said yes) after the most incredible meal I’ve had in a long time. Around Tuscany (Sienna, San Gimignano, Luca, San Gimignano and Pisa) exploring some vineyards on the way, and out to the Cinque Terre for a night. Finally, up on the train to Venice where we spent our remaining couple of days. All in all a pretty perfect month, though the jet-lag with a quick return trip to the US the week I got home was a little less fun. Roll on 2008.11.

Deirdre did a rocking job at recording the intros at the summit. I totally recommend anyone who couldn’t attend the summit to check them out and match faces with names. Thanks Deirdre!

As Stephen posted, we have OpenSolaris 2008.05 mirrors available, along with a torrent. If you’re experiencing problems trying to get the image from dlc.sun.com (and a number of people are - apologies, we’re trying to fix as soon as possible), try one of the other mirrors instead.

OpenSolaris 2008.05 is here, and with the focus on simplicity, this blog post really shouldn’t go much further than 3 simple words -

• Get
• Learn
• Share

To those that contributed, thank you! You rock my world, and I’m incredibly thankful for having the opportunity of working with you.

OpenSolaris 2008.05 is the first official release in a new binary distribution based on the OpenSolaris operating system. The single Live CD install image allows you to boot up to a desktop environment in seconds, and enjoy it before needing installing it onto a system. The introduction of a new package management system, IPS, allows users to install additional packages from network-based software repositories. The benefits of ZFS as the default root file-sysem provide the best environment to snapshot and rollback your system at any stage, with a best-of-both-worlds inclusion of the GNU utilities like bash(1). In many ways, hell has frozen over, and we’ve fundamentally changed how software is delivered to our users. For the better.

As Stephen mentioned there’s many more ways to get the install image, with both the Live CD and package repository being freely re-distributable, allowing those in network restricted countries to mirror locally and share.

To top if off, we even pulled off a new website, for those consuming our technology rather than producing it. It seemed the right fit at the time, rather than trying to shoe horn a significant area of growth for us into a set of heavily technical discussions.

Free CDs are also available - normally we ship one per person, but if you intend on organizing an event and you want more, let us know. Share the bubble love. Hubba Bubba.

Stephen and Tim talk about what’s coming in the OpenSolaris May 5th release - check it out!.

The year is flying. Really flying. Not only has NZ changed clocks screwing up my Google calendar settings once again, but I’m just over a week out to flying over to the OpenSolaris Developer Summit, starting a full month of travel. Jesse is continuing to rock in organizing the summit, and by the line up of rock stars attending, the event should be a real treat. If you haven’t made your arrangements and are in the area, do please attend - we’d love you to be there! I’m really looking forward to hanging out with all the people I met last year, and the few new faces that will be there too.

We’re also co-ordinating the summit with the first meeting of the OpenSolaris Governing Board. It’s been an absolute pleasure working with jbeck, alanc, jimgris, webmink and plocher, and Michelle is keep us all in line as the OGB Secretary this year. We’ve had some incredibly productive calls so far, and will be nice to catch up over dinner on Friday night right before the summit. We’ll also be hosting an OGB Townhall at 15:45-17:00 on Saturday - if you have anything you’d like to bring up, email ogb-discuss@opensolaris.org, or log a bug against the OGB category.

No sooner is the developer summit over, then Jesse is going to wrap us all in a bus and take us up to San Francisco to attend CommunityOne - it’s free to attend, and has a pretty cool line up of talks. I’ll be taking part in a “Operating System Community Panel” with Bacon, Brockmeier and Wade from Ubuntu, OpenSuSE and Fedora moderated by the charming Barton George. The event is free to attend, so you too can come along and throw tomatoes at us. I’ve heard rumours there’ll be an OpenSolaris party that evening too - bonus!

One day later, it’ll be into the JavaOne week and I’ve signed up to be a booth baby at the OpenSolaris stand, dropping into SecondLife, and hopefully getting to attend some of the keynote sessions. College students can attend free this year. Come by the stand and say hi.

Then it’s most definitely vacation with Jayne around SF, Spain and Italy. Woo!