OpenSolaris discussions.

As everyone knows, public mailing lists can be the heart of the open-source community. OpenSolaris is no exception.

The OpenSolaris discussions page lists all the mailing lists - some of them were just added today.

OpenSolaris-discuss is the big mailing list. Send an email to opensolaris-discuss-subscribe@opensolaris.org to subscribe. The Jive archive is also available for this list.

Feel free to subscribe and join in.

And, here's the thread about un-BFUing your system I alluded to in my earlier post.

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OpenSolaris graduates.

Finally. OpenSolaris is now public. No more NDA. Halleujah.

The upside of the NDA process is that Sun has been able to get some preliminary feedback before showing it off to the world. So, in concert with the legal vetting that was going on, roughly 145 developers got a 'sneak peek.'

IMHO, this is pretty much akin to the Incubation process that Apache enforces all incoming projects to go through. Sun just didn't know what code they could release and what they couldn't. So, showing it to everyone wasn't a real possibility.

As I mentioned on OSNews, four Apache infrastructure folks have been sitting in on this pilot program. I hope our input has helped.

OpenSolaris starts out with releasing Build 17.5 - you have to start with the Build 16 available in the Solaris Express (SX) linked to on the OpenSolaris website. The most notable change from Solaris 10 is that grub is now the bootloader on Intel machines. Yay! That by itself is cause to upgrade to Build 16 at least.

However, that comes at a cost: you can't upgrade your Solaris 10 GA box to Build 17.5 - you have to upgrade to Build 12 or higher first. So, the easiest way to do this is to jump from GA to SX, BFU to 16, and then BFU to 17.5.

If you upgrade via BFU, you can not ever return and do a traditional upgrade: you must from that point forward always BFU your system. Caveat emptor. Some Sun folks have posted that they've been sort of able to un-BFU a system - but it's not for the faint of heart, nor will they support it. LiveUpgrade may be helpful too; but I haven't had a chance to play with it either.

I was able to compile Build 16 in about 2 hours and 7 minutes on my Pentium 4 desktop - that seems about par for the course.

As a bit of technical appetizer, here's some additional steps that aren't in the release notes (but are in the developer reference) that might be helpful if you do decide to BFU your system. You do this after nightly completes. ('unset CC' is your friend if you happen to set your CC variables; otherwise the build will fail in odd ways.)

First off, set your environment (yes, as root):

# export FASTFS=/opt/onbld/bin/i386/fastfs
# export BFULD=/opt/onbld/bin/i386/bfuld
# export GZIPBIN=/usr/bin/gzip

Then, you run:

# /opt/onbld/bin/bfu <build_dir>/archives/i386/nightly

I got the following harmless errors (which is known and should be fixed soon):

cp: cannot access /net/greenline.eng/meta0/smf/post-5090532/sysidtool.xml
bfu: could not copy /net/greenline.eng/meta0/smf/post-5090532/sysidtool.xml
cp: cannot access /net/greenline.eng/meta0/smf/post-5090532/kdmconfig.xml
bfu: could not copy /net/greenline.eng/meta0/smf/post-5090532/kdmconfig.xml

After I got the BFU prompt, I did:

bfu# /opt/onbld/bin/acr
bfu# reboot

Voila. uname now reports:

SunOS blahblah 5.11 build i86pc i386 i86pc

Now, the hard part begins. Come and join the effort:

http://www.opensolaris.org/

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