Life is so good, it gets better every day

Just got to FOSS.in this morning to join in the fun during the OpenSolaris and GNOME project days there. Everyone’s pumped up about the conference and you can hear the din of people’s horns acknowledging that right across town. It promises to be a pretty excellent conference. I’m giving a talk this morning on The Secret diary of an OpenSolaris Hacker, aged 13 and 3/4 at 10am. I’ll be stepping through some of the development processes involved in contributing to the project, and helping explain how you can raise your profile in the community based on your contributions. Come join us!

Day 2 at the Digital Summit. Hasn’t quite had the same fizz as yesterday morning, but enjoyable nonetheless. Didn’t think Cullen was half as good as Cunliffe. As usual, there’s some random babbling notes from today too.

I’m attending the Digital Future Summit up in Auckland today and tomorrow. While not quite as interactive as I’d like (and seriously, there’s a lot of paper materials for a digital summit), it’s been a pretty fascinating set of speakers. I’ve been uploading a set of random babbling notes from time to time.

Quim: There’s critique and there’s personal attacks - it’s a very, very fine line that we all need to be aware of. Calling Jeff a “psychotic failure”, “erratic fool” or “paranoid psycho” is anything but constructive, and in all honesty, pretty laughable given Jeff’s involvement within GNOME over the years and the contributions he’s made. Jeff’s a very close personal friend, has been nothing other than inspirational and supportive to me during my career, and I respect him highly to be a good visionary for the project. Sorry Murray, but I strongly disagree with you, and I’m disappointed that todays commentary on Planet GNOME has taken away from the positivity of the election campaign and those standing to help out in the running of the GNOME Foundation (let alone the people who are watching from outside the community).

One of the hotly debated issues since we launched last week was around the addition of /usr/gnu/bin to the default path, along with the addition of bash as the default user shell. I’ve been a bash user for a pretty long time, and never really found that it got in the way much (especially compared to the older generation shells). I’ve never really had much of a reason to change.

This week I’ve decided to make ksh93 my default shell, downloaded and installed from Roland’s excellent snapshots. While I use the command-line pretty much every day, I certainly don’t use it extensively for scripting, and I probably mostly care about tab completion, and clearing my terminal window.

For tab completion, ksh93 lists the options by number and details the path, allowing you to choose one by a simple ‘N<tab>’ key combination -

gman@rampage:~$ z
 1) /usr/bin/zipgrep                  10) /usr/bin/zcat
 2) /usr/bin/zsh-4.3.4                11) /usr/bin/zipcloak
 3) /usr/bin/zipsplit                 12) /usr/sbin/zlogin
 4) /usr/bin/zipnote                  13) /usr/sbin/zoneadm
 5) /usr/bin/zip                      14) /usr/sbin/zpool
 6) /usr/bin/zsh                      15) /usr/sbin/zdump
 7) /usr/bin/zipinfo                  16) /usr/sbin/zic
  /usr/bin/zenity                   17) /usr/sbin/zonecfg
 9) /usr/bin/zonename                 18) /usr/sbin/zfs

which feels pretty useful, though less useful when you type ‘gnome <tab>’ since the output is now a single column. With bash you get a similar single column output, but it is piped through more to avoid having to scroll up later. Tab completion also seems a little awkward with ksh93 if you get part of the path wrong, since it seems to add 4 spaces after you tab making it look as if the completion succeeded.

For clearing a screen, ksh93 at the moment seems a lot more irritating. The key combination is ‘<esc><ctrl>l’, whereas bash is just ‘<ctrl>l’. I’m sure the ksh93 one is doing something more, but well, gets in the way for my use.

I’ll continue for the rest of the week and see how it all works out. I do like the shnote, shtinyurl, and shtwitter scripts in /usr/demo/ksh/fun though!

Today we released the first milestone for Project Indiana, the OpenSolaris Developer Preview. Before you even read the rest of this blog entry, start your download. The locals of Guam (the last known inhabitable place in the planet to see the final hours of October pass by) are now celebrating, hopefully with some strong alcohol.

I’d like to shout out some “thank yous” right off the bat. Thanks to everyone involved in the various projects that made up this distribution, not just those on opensolaris.org but the wider free and open source community - you guys are my heros, and I strongly value your continued commitment to freedom. I’d also like to thank those projects a little closer to home that we’ve focused on for this first release, caiman, ips, and modernization (and those behind the scenes herding them - Bill, Dan, Kelly & Bonnie). They’ve survived network outages, fires *and* earthquakes to get this out the door on time - awesome! At a personal level I’d like to particularly thank David, Stephen, Dave, Danek, Sanjay and Bart for their continued patience in answering my many questions. And finally, I’d like to thank my wonderful, wonderful team mates Sara, Patrick, Jesse, Derek, Jim, Terri, and most of all Ian. We got there, woo!

Enough of the oscars, show me the software!

The developer preview is only x86 at this time (for sheer practical reasons of wanting to get something out of the door), and should run on a minimum memory requirement of 512Mb on the metal, but also in VMWare. You’ll also notice when you start playing with it -

• It is a single CD download, so much of the software you’d expect to see in Solaris Express is not there, some of which will be available from a network package repository
• It’s built on Nevada b75a
• It is also a LiveCD, allowing you to try before you install on to your disk
• Contains the latest bits of the new Caiman installer, with a significantly improved user experience
• ZFS as default filesystem - NO WAY! WAY
• IPS as the underlying network based package management system (though SVR4 packaging is still available)
• /usr/gnu/bin has been added to the default path
• bash is the default shell
• GNOME 2.20 goodies

This first release is a prototype - some indication that we really are serious about putting this together. It has come out of the proverbial sausage factory with relatively little testing and could contain bugs that could lead to panics, data corruption or other similarly uncomfortable situations. You should probably not run this in your data center.

Download it, try it, but most importantly, tell us about it! As always, we need your help - join us on indiana-discuss (or one of the other specific project aliases). We’re not done, we’re just getting started.

Thanks to a whole heap of people (John x 2, Tim) we have a bunch of recordings of various summit sessions uploaded. I’d like to warn people that the quality of the audio is poor at times, and very little post processing has been done. Ken has also been doing a set of rocking writeups (Batteries Not Included), and Jim’s been doing an awesome job at compiling links.

I’d just like to express a big Thank you to all the people who came to Santa Cruz this weekend for the OpenSolaris Developer Summit. I had an excellent time meeting everyone from right across the community, and I hope those that attended had a bunch of fun too. Hope to see the numbers grow when we do it again in 6 months time.

I’d also, of course, like to thank the people in my team for rocking so hard, especially Jesse. And thanks to Sun too (Dan and Marc) for being willing to fund the event. I’m super pumped for the developer preview release at the end of the month, and charged to make the big push for a first release in Spring 2008.

Some people doubted the summit would be successful. I say ‘HAH!’ Let me welcome the new OpenSolaris mascot, Paxton the flying pig. Awesome!

Ian’s just finished his welcome to the OpenSolaris summit, and we’re just doing the round-room introductions - great to see so many people from different backgrounds and interests. Jesse has totally rocked pulling this together - the university has an amazing setting, and so far everything is going awesomely!