OpenSolaris

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

  » 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.

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.

The OpenSolaris Testing Group provides a forum for discussing OpenSolaris test issues and works with developers to ensure quality. Join in the conversation on one of the testing discussion lists.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

  » 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.

  » 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.

  » 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.

  » 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.