We’ve made incredible progress over the past two months, and the community activities have increased. The IRC channel audience has grown considerably. Starting today, we’ll be working on some of the final tasks, before we release NCP2, the final version.

Bounty

This hackathon also features a bounty for various tasks, sponsored by Nexenta Systems. There are small awards for some of the high priority tasks, including porting efforts, documentation, and creating Nexenta spinoffs.

The task list from the announcement.

Package porting:  Most of the packages in the repository are now automatically built. There are a few crucial packages that need to be built manually, and allow the builder to pick up on the rest.

Documentaiton: Not everyone knows how easy some tasks are on Nexenta. Help us write documentation, so new users find migrating much easier.

Distributions: NCP has now evolved to a tested core platform. Use the existing packages and window managers in the repository to build your own distribution using our distribution builder; tune Nexenta for a particular appliance and help us enhance our installer.

Significant contributions will be featured on the Nexenta project Homepage.

Further Information: http://www.nexenta.org/os/Hackathon
IRC web interface: http://www.nexenta.org/chat
Autobuilder: http://builder.tajinc.org/?f=repository_status

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.

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).