Friday, January 28, 2005

OpenSolaris on PowerPC looks for a new name!

One kind (albeit anonymous!) soul suggested recently in the comment that natural name for OpenSolaris on PPC would be Polaris. Indeed, the idea seems to be obvious. My only concern is that the word Polaris is sooo overused, that it would hardly be associated with [Open]Solaris. That's my opinion of course. I'd like to hear what readers think. Any other suggestions ? Please comment.

P.S. Please, please register. Don't be shy !

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

OpenSolaris starts its public life

Well, it finally went live. The OpenSolaris web site is opened to public and there a lot of stories around the web on that. I actually planned to stay late this night (Israel time) and blog too, but plans had changed - I had to fly to the US on extremely short notice. So I am kinda missing all the fun - sitting in the hotel after long transatlantic flight and full day on customer site. The good news, however, is that there are a lot of OpenSolaris Pilot members blogging like crazy today, so I would hardly say something new anyhow. Or would I ? Hard to say... The stuff I am on currently (PowerPC port) is far from having something "demonstratable". But then it is a lot of fun. Someday we'll be able to show snapshots like that one, but running on PowerPC. I know that day will come...

Monday, January 24, 2005

"Solaris on IBM's Power anyone?"

The Register just published this article on upcoming OpenSolaris announcement.

"Someone could take some of this technology and build a great new market that no one has ever thought of before," Weinberg said. "We don't know what directions those things will go, but there is one example already of a pilot where Solaris has been ported to another chip architecture."

Solaris on IBM's Power anyone?

Eventually... :)

Saturday, January 22, 2005

The mother of all blogs ?

That is quite a discovery. Who would imagine ...

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

ODW arrival photo series


Friends insisted that I should publish this Pegasos II arrival photo series. Indeed it was fun and here pictures are. Enjoy !

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Open Desktop Workstation is on its way - IV (last ?)

Open Desktop Workstation finally arrived ! Well, let's see how long it will take until first Solaris boot ;-) Many thanks to all the people involved in arranging shipment.

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Open Desktop Workstation is on its way - III

Well, they do use jets after all to move the packages. However, I think I understand what they meant when they estimated Jan 17 for package arrival. The box appeared at Ben Gurion Airport FedEx warehouse at Jan 9, 9:02 AM. And it is still there as I write it (Jan 11, 9:54 PM). And it doesn't look like they going to release it soon. Bummer ...

Saturday, January 08, 2005

Open Desktop Workstation is on its way - II

FedEx reported that the ODW have passed Atlantic and is in Paris, France today. Quite close. How much time will it take to bring it to Israel I wonder ?

Friday, January 07, 2005

My favorite OS on PowerPC rebirth - continued

Mr. napobo3 in his recent comment brought up interesting questions.

"Solaris on PPC cannot be a one-man-project IMHO. What is your estimation on the amount human*hours it will take? Do you think the volunteers will come from Open Solaris or Linux/PPC community? How the IBM and/or Freescale will be involved? "

Porting OpenSolaris to PowerPC is a community project. While community may consist of only one person in theory, that is definitely not the case with OpenSolaris/PPC. [BTW, we need a name. OpenSolaris on PowerPC is too long.] As for the labor estimation - I really hope it would take infinite amount of work. Setting any definite number would mean that work could be done and forgotten, while really useful and alive project would evolve all the time.
Volunteers are coming from many communities - Linux/PPC including. I think it is quite natural. And the experience the Linux/PPC people can bring to the project is invaluable. Pieter Van den Abeele and Sven Luther, for example, are onboard from the very beginning.
As for vendors involvement - Genesi is involved already. Freescale has something to do with it too. bbrv, I believe, can elaborate more on that. As for others - time will tell.

Open Desktop Workstation is on its way

Just checked with FedEx.

Ship date Jan 5, 2005
Estimated delivery Jan 17, 2005 11:59 PM

Jan 17, huh ? What do they ship with, a steamboat ?

Thursday, January 06, 2005

My favorite OS on PowerPC rebirth

Why am I doing it ? Indeed, why ? Isn't there quite a number of UNIX-like operating systems already running on PowerPC ? Well, yeah. There are many. The only thing is I do not really like them. I like Solaris. I am in Solaris world since 1992. I worked with many other UNIX systems during these years - *BSD, Linux, HP/UX, AIX, IRIX. None of them felt like it. Working with Solaris you get used to the style. Solaris style. I know, I know, Linux bigot would say same thing about Linux and HP/UX guy would say similar things about HP/UX. I am fond of Solaris, however. And I was really excited when Solaris 2.5.1 was released on PowerPC in addition to SPARC and x86. That was really great proof of what Solaris is - very clean UNIX implementation which can easily be ported to new architecture. As much I was excited when it was released, as much I was disappointed when I learned that PowerPC port is canceled. That's why when I got on OpenSolaris Pilot program first thought was - that's a wonderful opportunity to bring the best UNIX out there and one of the best CPU architectures together again.
So here am I - working on PPC port. And while at that I'd like to thank Bill Buck and Raquel Velasco for their support for the project.

Sunday, January 02, 2005

GMail invitations are available again

I seems to have 10 more GMail invitation to send. Drop me a comment if you would like to have one.