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       1. March 2008

October 2006 OpenSolaris Community Newsletter

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

• Eric Boutilier's mail list activity reports: October 2nd, October 17th.
• Glynn Foster's weekly news updates: October 1st, October 8th, October 15th, October 22nd, October 30th.

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

• Narayana Janga presented OpenSolaris and Zones at ApacheCon on October 9th in Austin, Texas.
• OpenSolaris community members participated in Sun's Tech Day's conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina on October 23rd. Photos from OpenSolaris Day here.
• There is an OpenSolaris Developer Conference being organized in Germany for the end of February.

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. Links to user groups, lists, and leaders here. Sign up to all the OpenSolaris user groups here.

• 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. User group page and list here.
• 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

• Nexenta developers released Alpha 6 on October 17th.
• eWeek reviewed NexentaOS Alpha 5, Belenix 0.5 and Schillix 0.5.2.
• Links to all the OpenSolaris distributions can be found here.

Technical Status

New Components

• Binaries for SPARC graphics device drivers were made available on October 20th.

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

• Mercurial beta started on October 18th with the availability of an ON Mirror Repository.

SCM Work: General

• Information and pointers available on the SCM page.
• Milestones for SCM work are updated.

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

• Joey Guo reported on the growth of OpenSolaris within the Chinese university community here and here.
• Happy Birthday to BeleniX.

October's Newsletter Contributors

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