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March 2006 OpenSolaris Community Newsletter


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

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. For full list of Jive changes go here.

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. More metrics here.

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
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.