OSDevCon 2008: Register Now!

I’m happy to announce that we have completed everything and we are ready for the conference. The last remaining bits with the VISA payment system have been sorted out and we have successfully opened registration for the visitors. Here is the official announcement Dirk has sent out on May 15.



I thought I’d share with you some more organization details.

The full conference program covers two days and the Wednesday is reserved for the tutorials. At the moment we have four half-day tutorials available.

Every conference attendee will get a conference bag with printed proceedings and some small things from the sponsors, these are not finalized yet. More importantly, the conference registration fee contains full lunch for both days of the conference in the conference venue itself, so that we don’t need to hop around and search for food and we can still continue chatting over the lunch breaks. On Thursday evening there will be a social event: a boat trip through the historical center of Prague on the Vltava river with the dinner and some beers.

And of course we have the discounts. Although we advertised discounts for the students and for the GUUG, NLUG, and CZOSUG members only, this does not mean that we are not offering discounts to other OpenSolaris User Groups members. Just don’t be shy and get in contact with us.

So if you have not registered yet, do it now as the venue hotel rooms are filling up quickly.

Looking forward meeting you in Prague.

June 3, 2008 Conferences, EN, OpenSolaris

OSDevCon 2008 Call for Papers closing soon

The organization team of the OpenSolaris Developer Conference 2008 was rather busy over the past months. It looks like we are approaching the deadline for paper submissions, so if you haven’t already submitted your presentation, do so now. If you did, than thanx a lot, all the submissions we received are looking to be of a very high quality, and we are going to meet quite a few interesting people. Stay tuned.



We also did a bit on the marketing front. The image you should see above is one of the official conference banners that you are free to use on your website if you would like to help us to spread the word. And since we are community effort relying on sponsorship money only, we will really appreciate that.

And last but not least, we are almost ready to open the registration for visitors that will allow you to book your hotel, pay your tickets, and plan your stay in Prague. You will hear from us soon.

April 16, 2008 Conferences, EN, OpenSolaris, Opensource

OSDevCon 2008 Call For Papers

OpenSolaris Developer Conference 2008 Call For Papers has just been opened. I’m proud to be part of the organization team and also of the fact that we are hosting the conference in the city I live in, which is Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic.



We are looking forward meeting you all here in Prague in June 2008.

December 4, 2007 Conferences, EN, OpenSolaris

vim: command not found

The dark days of OpenSolaris are gone. From build 78, VIM, a powerful editor of choice for many programmers written by Bram Moolenar, will become part of Solaris Freeware Consolidation.

In short that means that you should not see the familiar vim: command not found message anymore. VIM will become part of SXCE build 78, it should be in the next SXDE that will be released spring 2008, and I hope that Project Indiana will pick it up soon.

The putback was done by one of our colleagues, Martina Tomisova from Sun Prague last Friday and we celebrated it today by eating Indian sweets.

November 12, 2007 EN, Life at SUN, OpenSolaris

The Swiss Army Knife of Data Storage

Title says it all. Nexenta Systems Inc., the company behind Nexenta Operating System, a powerful combination of OpenSolaris Core and Debian/GNU Linux packaging system and user land applications today announced availability of the NEXENTASTOR APPLIANCE.

It is based on OpenSolaris, it is based on Debian/GNU, it features ZFS root/boot configuration, transactional apt-get dist-upgrade side by side with zpool snapshot.

And if I’m not mistaken it is the first commercial product based on OpenSolaris and not being produced by Sun Microsystems.

November 1, 2007 EN, Nexenta, OpenSolaris

Nexenta & Indiana @ BOSUG

Here is Moinak talking enthusiastically about the Project Indiana at October BOSUG Meeting where I had a chance to talk a bit about the Challenges and Future Plans for Nexenta.

Moinak talking about project Indiana

The audience was very open asking a lot of questions and discussing with smile on their faces various aspects of open development of OpenSolaris.

At let me say it straight, no matter how much we all expect big things from Indiana, we all agreed that the way it is communicated and developed is not very community like. Did I hear someone say something about Sun throwing the source code over the wall?

Let’s hope this will change as more and more code becomes available for the public to see.

Here are the pictures I captured, and there is the rest from Milan.

October 9, 2007 Conferences, EN, Nexenta, OpenSolaris

Running SXCE zone on Nexenta

This tutorial will teach you how to easily setup the OpenSolaris Zone running a copy of recent Solaris Express Community Edition on your Nexenta Operating System. You will need to do a few manual tricks, but in the end it should just work.

Step 1: Creating fully populated zone on your SXCE box

root@sxce# zonecfg -z sxce68 '
create -b; set zonepath=/zones/sxce68; commit'
root@sxce# zoneadm -z sxce68 install
root@sxce# zoneadm -z sxce68 detach

Step 2: Transfering zone to your Nexenta box

Use whatever mechanism is comfortable for you. I have chosen to create my zone on ZFS pool created on USB flash disk that I can just zpool export and zpool import later.

Step 3: Fooling zonecfg and booting

root@nexenta# zonecfg -z sxce68 '
create -b; set zonepath=/zones/sxce68; commit'
# instead of using 'zonecfg attach' we just
# manually change /etc/zones/index
# to indicate that sxce68 is installed
root@nexenta# vi /etc/zones/index
root@nexenta# zoneadm -z sxce68 boot

Networking, services, etc. are left to the reader as a homework.

July 13, 2007 EN, Nexenta, OpenSolaris

apt-get snapshot on Nexenta

I just started to think about implementing…

# apt-get snapshot
Cloning the root file system
to syspool/backup-2007-06-26:17:50
Please use /sbin/update-grub to refresh
the list of available boot environments

…when I found the post about playing with the ZFS boot on NexentaCP envisioning the very same idea.

Guys, we are actually very close to implementing this on Nexenta Operating System. Allmost all the bits and pieces are in place.

The only thing that is missing for me is the ability to override the bootfs property from the GRUB bootloader, so that you don’t need to specify where to boot from as the pool’s property:

zpool set bootfs=syspool/myrootfs syspool

Anyways, this is going to be very exciting, because it will solve the non-existence of the backout option that I have been hearing about many times as being the major drawback of the Debian’s package management system.

June 26, 2007 EN, Nexenta, OpenSolaris

DebConf 2007 Edinburgh, Scotland

The seventh annual Debian Conference has been organized in the beautiful city of Edinburgh. And not only that, the conference venue is located just next to the city center, in a old comfortable and friendly place that has got its own atmosphere.

I have met here a lot of really interesting (and famous - in the world of Debian/GNU Linux) people. My impression is that the atmosphere was just amazing, very friendly, open, productive, …. Well, we had some discussions about various license related issues, but as long as we behave as rational people and as long as there exists a common sense I’m not worried.

Tom Marble and Mathias Klose

The picture above shows Tom Marble of Sun and Mathias Klose of Canonical talking about how to best package various Java upstreams available on the market for Debian/GNU Linux, Ubuntu, and later I hope even for Nexenta.

I have taken a chance to present some nice OpenSolaris features like zoneadm clone smoothly integrated within Nexenta.

It’s a pitty I had no more time to spend at DebConf2007, but I’m already looking forward the DebConf2008. The videos of the presentations are becoming available one after one.


Debian/GNU Linux 4.0 Etch running in BrandZ


The new flash demos about pbuilder running on top ZFS powered OpenSolaris Zones (that are able to host the Debian/4.0 Etch and other Linux distros thanx to BrandZ extension) are all available at my Nexenta Pages.

June 19, 2007 Conferences, EN, Nexenta, OpenSolaris, Opensource

LinuxTag Conference 2007

I’m back from Berlin where I once again spoke about Nexenta Operating System. I have used slightly modified version of my OpenSolaris for Human Beings talk and I think it worked well. People were again smiling during the part where I present that it is normal not to support –version commandline switch in the Sun code.

Presenting at LinuxTag

There is also new flash demo available for Nexenta/Debian/Ubuntu newbies that will teach you how to modify existing Debian Package and install it from your custom private APT Repository. Check it out on my Nexenta pages.

June 4, 2007 Conferences, EN, Nexenta, OpenSolaris

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