Anil Gulecha’s Musings

I’ve been neglecting my blogging duties, but I’m back on track. Lots of things have happened in the recent times, but the big news today is the release of the Nexenta Core Platform 2. This release has been a year in the making, and took a lot of hard work.

We’ve also produced a short comic, with our very own hero, Nexentaman, to walk you through NCP. Click below to read the comic.

The Adventures of Nexentaman

Links

Nexenta homepage: http://www.nexenta.org

Artwork and Wallpapers: http://www.nexenta.org/os/SpreadTheWord

IRC : #nexenta on freenode

Go ahead, test drive Nexenta, and spread the word

Oracle has aquired Sun.

There were weeks of speculation of a buyout by IBM, which generated loads of discussions on the opensolaris forums. The biggest fear was IBM buying Sun, and killing off competing products. Sun and IBM competed on many fronts.. Opensolaris vs AIX, Eclipse vs Netbeans, Mysql vs DB2, Power vs Sparc, etc.. not to mention the server hardware market.

Sun’s price-tag was nothing to IBM.. it could’ve bought Sun out with a week’s revenues. The talks fail, Oracle swoops in, and grabs Sun. A /. comment sums it up..

I mentioned in a previous post that GUI related packages were being populated into the NCP2 repository. Since pictures are a thousand words:

Gnome, GIMP and Irssi running on NCP2 (not to mention the Heron)

Huge thanks to dtbartle, who has actively been porting Gnome into the package repository. Why not hop into #nexenta and say thanks.

Theres also other window managers being populated at the moment. Small ones like Enlightenment (e16) and 9wm are fully in.

PS: Also another round of hackthon is in the plans. Stay tuned for more.

The last time I mentioned the Nexenta autobuilder, it was just opened and not fully completed. That changed recently.

The autobuilder is now in the works and since the beinning of the week has been chugging away tirelessly, working on Ubuntu Hardy’s 8.04 repository. The result.. over 2500 packages now reside in Nexenta’s contrib repsoitory. Going at this rate, we should have triple this amount by the end of next week.

The autobuilder is built to scale, and all of the work is shared between 2 nodes. The pace of package porting will increase with more packages. Do you have a machine free for the autobuilder to use (and have the bandwidth to spare)? Drop in on #nexenta or the devel mailing list, and we’ll help you setup. Look for Tim Spriggs (aka rootard). We’re still a good while away from Ubuntu’s 20000 packages.

The autobuilder will however not work for packages that need to be ported to Opensolaris/Nexenta. These should be few and far in between. It does fishily sound like another hackathon.

I just published a devzone article on OSnews.

Devzone

From the blurb:

Devzones, short for development zones, is a type of virtualization found in the Nexenta distribution. It can be used to define a base developer environment, which can be easily cloned many times. These copies can easily be destroyed and recreated. Devzones are built upon Opensolaris Zones, which are extensions of a chroot-like environment for the entire installed system. In other words, it allows for virtualization of an Opensolaris environment (and variants of Linux), without the performance hit that is generally associated with virtualization. This article gives a practical introduction into using Devzones. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article…

The devzone homepage: http://devzone.sf.net

Let Me Know

My friend Nitin has a knack for entrepreneurial stuff.

One of his expliots had been the Let Me know website at letmeknow.wordpress.com which was a platform used to notify students from around the country about opportunities that come up. The world before let me know meant various events, shows, scholarships, contests, etc needed to be printed on posters and pasted on school notice boards. Let Me Know changed that and turned into a one stop shop for all such information.

I can vouch for this because I heard of BITS, Goa tech fest this way, and built a robot which won accolades :). So there.. add Let Me Know to your RSS feed, or subscribe to their notifications by entering your mail at the website (its better than regularly checking the site).

PS: The robot reminds me, I still have the Spots, the motor, the ICs, solder and the metal casing. I should plan on some hardware hacking one of these weekends..

I’ve been following the KDE4 release for sometime now, and have been amazed at the great work done by the developers. The UI looks amazing, and the attention to detail has been magnificent. I was pleasantly surprized when one of the BOSUG members saw KDE4 and asked.. “Is that OSX?”

But this post is about KDE4 on Windows. I’ve been following the blog Introducing KDE4, Luis Augusto, which is a screenshot oriented tour of various KDE4 software. The latest entry talks about KDE4 on windows, and the screenshots speak for themselves.

Dolphin on Windows

Amarok on Windows

If you’re interested in what is potentially the next generation of Desktop on the Unix/Linux platform, add this blog your feed reader.

Devzone

If you’ve kept track of the latest in the Nexenta community, or logged into our build machines, you’ll know about a neat little set of utilities we have built on top of Opensolaris Zones. Devzones are a simple concept which allow you to create a custom zone, and creating multiple copies for developers.

Devzone

The devzone package is now available online from sourceforge under the GPL2 license.

We’ve been adding new features to make administration simple. Devzones will be built into the upcoming NCP2 Beta release.

Meanwhile you can take a look at what’s cooking in the background at the below address, or checkout the latest from SVN

Project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/devzone/

SVN: svn co https://devzone.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/devzone devzone

AutoBuilder

The autobuilder project too has been hosted on sourceforge. This is a distributed way to build those humongous apt repositories for your Ubuntu sized distro.

Client nodes can request for packages to build. This is almost fully complete and is already functional as a web based view of debain apt repositories. Give it a try at http://builder.tajinc.org/

Project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/autobuilder/

SVN: svn co https://autobuilder.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/autobuilder autobuilder

I’m working on a simple tutorial for devzones, and it should be published shortly.. so stay tuned for that. Meanwhile, spread the word.

Thank Tim Spriggs(rootard) for these tools. If you have any questions, or want to participate, join our IRC channel at #nexenta@freenode (there’s a web based interface here).

I putback new packages into the NCP2 repository today, and you can now have SMF support for your favorite server packages in the repository. Before I list them, a little bit on SMF.

Service Management Framework (SMF)

SMF is the opensolaris replacement for the legacy services start unix framework (what /etc/init.d did until now, and continues to on Linux).

Services in Nexenta are handled using solaris SMF. This makes it very easy to start and stop services; you dont have to worry about it’s dependency on other services, which is taken care of by SMF automatically. This cheetsheet lists how easy it is to use SMF.

SMFed Packages

• apache2
• mysql 5
• postgresql-8.3
• exim4
• rsync

All of these are ports of their Ubuntu 8.04 counterparts.

If you want toadd SMF support to a Nexenta package, take a look at my guide on adding SMF support.

If you want to follow the latest in the nexenta codebase, bookmark this RSS feed. This is also visible on the planet homepage, if you frequent there. If you run into any issues, ping us on the -devel mailing list or on #nexenta@freenode

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Recently I had been hunting around the web for a very lightweight, simple to use, flat file using, php based wiki. And I managed to find one. It’s called Pawfaliki

Pawfaliki

This wiki package is under 50 kb in size, has an easy to use wiki syntax, is CSS based, and has a very cool dark look. It matched my needs almost perfectly.

Test it out at www.pawfal.org

Fancy URLs

One minor nit I had was how the URL looked.. for example the About page would look like

http://www.pawfal.org/index.php?page=About

rather than a nice wiki like

http://www.pawfal.org/About

So like any good FOSS denizen, I went ahead and implemented small changes for this. Get the modified sources: pawfaliki052-modified.tar.gz

If you’d like to see the changes, get the diff for the original package at this bug I raised. (Note, I’ve renamed pawfaliki.php to index.php, and added a .htaccess file). The changes would go in if theres another release (the last one was a while back).

So there. Give this very small wiki package a try.