This month the OpenSolaris community announced the results of the Community Innovation Awards Program, the OGB voted to start reorganizing and simplifying the governance structure, the community met for the second time in a Town Hall forum, and members of the community gathered at conferences and user groups meetings around the world. All of that and more in the September issue of the OpenSolaris Community Newsletter.
Announcements
One Sept, 18th Sun announced the winners of the OpenSolaris(TM)
Community Innovation Awards Program, designed to fuel innovation around
OpenSolaris. The OpenSolaris program included both a contest and a
student grant component and was part of Sun's Open Source Community
Innovation Awards Program, a multi-year program running across several
open source communities with a $1 Million total prize.
The OpenSolaris community participated in hundreds of events
around the world to celebrate Software
Freedom Day in late September.
Follow all the announcements for OpenSolaris on
opensolaris-announce (forum here,
subscribe
here).
All community members are welcome to post to opensolaris-announce for
events, user group meetings, source/binary releases, etc. The list is
moderated for one way traffic only.
OpenSolaris in the Media
How
the FAA Is Bringing Its Air Traffic Systems into the 21st Century:
"Sun's open-source OpenSolaris/ZFS/SunFire server/Thumper storage
infrastructure -- which features built-in, state-of-the-art
virtualization capability -- was a key building block on which the FAA
IT evaluation group settled. Some of the new software is already being
used in the air traffic system; ZFS (Sun's open-source Zettabyte File
System) is being used in the FAA's air traffic data center. 'The FAA
uses a large quantity of Sun Solaris servers in a variety of
configurations to support some of our noncritical business
applications,' Andy Isaksen, manager of the Communications
Infrastructure Engineering Team for NADIN and architect of the original
mainframe system, said. 'ZFS is being used on at least one service
within the Air Traffic Organization Enterprise Data Center.'" -- eWeek,
September 24, 2008
Conferences & User Groups
User Group Meetings
The London
OpenSolaris User Group gatherered in September. Topics of
discussion icluded: CIFS (Common Internet Filesystem, or SMB (Server
Message Block).
The New
England OpenSolaris User Group held their 5th meeting on Sept.
10th. Jim Mauro presented Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Performance.
The Adelaide
OpenSolaris User Group gathered on Sept. 16th. Alex Sims
spoke on Java Web Server or CoolStack, which webserver is right
for me?
The Melbourne
OpenSolaris User Group met on Sept. 17th. Boyd Adamson spoke
on SMF. Chris Wells talked about Active Directory integration for
Solaris systems.
The New York
OpenSolaris User Group met on September 22nd. Isaac Rozenfeld
talked on What's New in OpenSolaris. George Wilson spoke on ZFS
Development Update.
The Silicon
Valley OpenSolaris User Group met on Sept. 25th. Stephen
Smalley, of the US National Security Agency (NSA), speak on security
technologies to confine flawed and malicious software. Tamarah Rockwood
showed her artwork which was submitted for the OpenSolaris Community
Innovations Awards.
The Berlin
OpenSolaris User Group met on Sept. 30th. Detlef Drewanz
spoke on Virtualisation with xVM Server and xVM Hypervisor.
The Great
Lakes OpenSolaris User Group Chicago, IL, met on
Sept. 30th. This month Linda Kateley was in town again and
shared the latest news on Solaris. Also, Eric Boutilier will be
demoing the ZFS send/receive feature.
There is an OpenSolaris
conference planned for October 24th/25th to be held in Szczecin,
Poland. The
conference will be English. The main goal of the conference is to
present OpenSolaris Operating system and its parent Sun Solaris 10
Openating System to a greater audience in Poland
. Prelegents include both Sun Microsystems engineers and community
members, but it is community driven and held. http://pl.opensolaris.org/os/project/pl/events/
Sun published the Tech Days 2008-2009
schedule.
The global developer tour will begin in late September 2008 and run to
June 2009 with stops in 13 cities. Check the dates and locations for a
conference near you.
The OpenSolaris
Web Community was launched in September, to house the
various projects related to operations, content, and infrastructure of
opensolaris.org.
Infrastructure Status
OpenSolaris content
Content developers working on the OpenSolaris.org Website
Project, in
conjunction with the OGB (OpenSolaris Governing Board) have updated all
of the common pages of the web site, streamlined navigation (removing
the splash pages introduced in May) and embarked on a weekly update to
the OpenSolaris.org home page to highlight communities, projects, and
individuals in the Feature Spot: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/features/
Webapp: Minor upgrade to the webapp was released. Exploring the
long term need to move off Jive entirely for another list-forum
solution with the new site.
SCM Console: Localization and security work done. Will go out for
testing as next step.
Authentication (auth): Updating the application based on the new
community structure voted on by the OGB. Completed and released the
user facing screens for testing on opensolaris.org. Passed security
tests. Localization engineering work done. Globalization community
deciding how many languages to translate auth into.
xWiki: testing how xwiki handles roles and rights and working on
integration issues with auth. Exploring the building of new tools to
migrate content from the old site to the new site when the time comes.
SCM (Source Code Management)
SCM team is finishing up some post ON transition work. Three
areas that we are focusing on is: tools code review, performance, and
granularity.
Mike Kupfer created a Mercurial
repository for the ON Developers Reference,using the makefile and XML
source from the Documentation community. TheURL for the repo is: ssh://anon@opensolaris.org/hg/onnv/devref
We are still in the process of creating a new schedule for the ON
move to opensolaris.org. There are a few dependicies listed on
the project page here: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/scm-migration/
We are in talks with the OpenRTI folks and working out details on how
to proceed with open development. Stay tuned for more details in
the month of October.
MilaX 0.3.1 version for SPARC now available. Based on Nevada 91.
This server (non-GUI) version include Apache, PHP, FTP, Samba and NFS
servers, Midnight Commander, Cdpr, Elinks, Fping, fstat, Iftop, Irssi,
Sysstat and other utilities. Also included IPS
(experimental) support. The main goal of this version to become a
RescueCD for sparcs. http://www.milax.org/
OpenSolaris Student Packs were released to Sun Campus
Ambassadors.
Student Packs include a re-spin of OpenSolaris 2008.05 to fix some
bugs, OpenOffice
2.4.1 (for Linux, Mac and Windows) and VirtualBox
1.6.4
(for Linux, Mac and Windows) and most importantly, a Virtual Image of
OpenSolaris with (Java, Sun Studio, AMP, and HPC). To get an
OpenSolaris Student Pack, contact your local Sun Campus Ambassador: http://developers.sun.com/students/community/map.jsp
Contributions to Consolidation Code
There was 5 code contributions put back into OpenSolaris in
September, bringing the total to 290. Thanks to Chitra B, Martin
Cerveny, Nils Goroll, Palle Lyckegaard, Meera R, and Hans Rosenfeld for
the bug
fixes. And thanks to the Sun engineers: Seth Goldberg, Mark Johnson,
Viswanathan Kannappan, John Sonnenschein, and Joep Vesseur, 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.
Governance
The OGB drafted and approved three proposals to simplify the
organization of the OpenSolaris community -- new
roles/groups, group creation process, membership process.
The board is now working with the website team to synchronize OGB reorg
plans with the roadmap to update the opensolaris.org infrastructure.
Part of this process will involve the rewriting of the OpenSolaris
Constitution, which the community will vote on in March of 2009. The
entire process is talking place on website-discuss
and ogb-discuss.
Subscribe to opensolaris-announce
to follow upcoming governance announcements.
OpenSolaris Community
Newsletter: A View from the OpenSolaris Infrastructure Engineering Team
Editor: Linda Bernal
Contributors: Jim Grisanzio, Michelle Olson About: The OpenSolaris Community
Newsletter is a monthly publication from Sun's OpenSolaris
Infrastructure Engineering Team, which is the group that originally
created the OpenSolaris project. The content primarily summarizes the
team's
infrastructure and community development efforts to support the
operations of the OpenSolaris project. Additional
information can also be drawn from OpenSolaris mailing lists, other Sun
teams, the news media, blogs, and various social networks involving
OpenSolaris. Contributions can be offered by posting to
advocacy-discuss.