Thermal Noise

BeleniX 0.7 has been released just a few seconds ago.

http://www.belenix.org/

This is the most kick-ass version of BeleniX ever. Among the most important features is the ability to install it to the hard disk and use it as a regular desktop OS. Release Notes details the other changes:

http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/?q=ReleaseNotes_0.7

I am just waiting for one more feature - An IPS repository of BeleniX packages and then I will make BeleniX my primary Desktop Operating System

Here is an example of how incredibly powerful DTrace can be. I had to solve a problem where a nice high-level overview of the code flow in a single threaded userland application would save me some pain the backside. Lo and Behold, Dtrace - The Universal Hammer for every nail.

Here is a simple visual call graph generator using 5 lines of DTrace combined with the outstanding Graphviz graphics library.

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India appears in the Top 10 of the Top500 supercomputers list for the first time: http://top500.org/site/systems/2838

EKA, is a Linux cluster of Clovertown based Intel Xeon systems connected via Infiniband. Congratulations to Tata Sons and HP !

Quite shamefully, Solaris runs on only two of the Top500 supercomputers. Blame it on the pathetic HPC userspace and community when compared to Linux !

The world is going BeleniX crazy ! I setup links to the isoHunt torrents on the BeleniX download page a few weeks back and the isoHunt folks responded most kindly by setting up a special box for seeding (Have you ever heard of that ?) and ran a front page article on BeleniX as a model project to use BitTorrent constructively.

As of today, the BeleniX DVD has more than 18000 (Yes Eighteen Thousand) seeds ! How many other torrents can claim as many seeds ? aXXo’s latest torrents have no more than 5000 seeds.

Is that frigging cool or what

P.S: For those who don’t know, isoHunt is the world’s most comprehensive BitTorrent search engine !

I had my DTrace article published in this month’s edition of Linux for You. It is a gentle introduction to the curious Unix programmer. I can’t reprint the article on the blog. But if you aren’t convinced about looking into DTrace yet, read on….

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I do some senseless stuff from time to time. But this is really wierd. Why would anyone want to run Internet Explorer on Windows let alone Solaris.

But then the Government of India doesn’t seem to think so. Some of their Income Tax Department pages are thoroughly broken on Firefox. Anyway I got wine running inside Solaris and ies4linux worked like a charm. Click on the link for a high-res picture of microsoft.com on IE on wine on Solaris on AMD64

While the rest of the world drooled over the iPhone, I got to play around with a SunSPOT today. W00t !

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UPDATE: To get compiz fusion for Solaris go here http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/

How is this for a kickass cool desktop ? Presenting to you my Solaris Express Desktop running Compiz …

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I recently came across an interesting hack in the linux kernel called “kexec”. exec() loads a userland program by overwriting the address space of the process calling the syscall. kexec is supposed to do the same with the kernel. Replace the running copy of a kernel with a newly specificed kernel.

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Ubuntu took the “free” operating system principle to an altogether different level by shipping CDs free to anyone who requested it. Now OpenSolaris is doing the same to reach out to developers who cannot download gigabytes of ones and zeros.

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Moinak announced the BeleniX Live DVD last night.

Now BeleniX has it all - It can run off a CD, DVD, USB and Hard Disk [ Floppy Disks won't be supported and Blu-Ray needs some time ]

The news generated nearly 12000 page-hits yesterday - our biggest since the birth of BeleniX !

Every conversation with geeks not working in Sun this week has been about ZFS and ZFS making it to Mac OS X - Leopard. I get thoroughly drilled on Sun’s financial strategy and how we plan to make money rather than being asked about instantaneous snapshots and self-healing capabilities of ZFS. Thats one of the disadvantages of working for a “Non-Profit Organization” (of which we are very proud, anyway)

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It might well go down in history as the month that changed the World. Or atleast the part of the world that me and my fellow humans who get paid for creating strings of ones and zeroes are primarily concerned with.

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Funny mail archived on LWN that draws an analogy to the working of the infamous OOM on Linux.

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The Best Operating System ever rolled out from India is one year old today. Happy Birthday BeleniX. Congratulations to Moinak, Sriram, Kishore and Pradhap who have put in a year of Nightouts, Weekends and Holidays and not to forget their great brains and creative energies into creating the most popular OpenSolaris LiveCD. BeleniX is talked about at the same level as Nexenta or GNU/Solaris, which is being devloped by a company, Nexenta Systems Inc. I have this gut feeling that the day when BeleniX is going to explode on the LiveCD scene big time is not too far away. Moinak already has been working vigorously towards adding some great new features (Somehow, he never runs out of ideas !). If you want to be a part of the action when that happens, visit the Project Page and find out how YOU can contribute to BeleniX. Thats not all. If you have other ideas, mail us and you might end up getting a cool BeleniX T-Shirt

BeleniX can now boot from a USB drive. We had a first hand demo and a talk on how it was done by Anil Gulecha, an engineering student in Bangalore in the Bangalore OpenSolaris User Group (BOSUG) meeting last night.
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Dtrace won the Wall Street Journal’s Innovation award for this year ! Its the second time in three years that Sun has won the top honor for innovation. Congrats to the three muskeeters of Dtrace.

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BeleniX appeared in the Times of India today. For those who don’t know what BeleniX is - It is an OpenSolaris LiveCD featuring a KDE/XFCE Desktop. Its the most user-friendly OpenSolaris Distro. And technically speaking, it contains a lot of innovative ideas - most of it coming from the mastermind of our local tech god - Moinak Ghosh.

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Its not rare for me to face the question “So, How do you make money ?” when I say that my company gives away its operating system for free. Yeah, Sun did “sell” Solaris a few years back but how many people do you think would have bought the OS alone without buying the Hardware ? That just let me wonder as to why people think you need to sell software at a price to make money.

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AMD DevCon 2006 happened today in Bangalore at the Taj Residency. This was the first time AMD was conducting a developer conference in India. It was somewhat similar in objective and organisation to the Intel Developer Forums (IDF) that happen every year. System Programmers ranging from BIOS Developers, Device Driver Developers, Operating System developers (yours truly), game developers, enterprise application developers - particularly those concerned about the 64 bit phenomenon were attending the show. To be frank, the morning session was mostly crap. Just some marketing junk spoken by some CXOs who have no clue about technology. But the afternoon session was excellent.

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For muggles who cannot read OS code, there is a starkly stunning piece of graphic art, that I think is a must see ! A syscall can traced by enabling a hook for the syscall trap handler and writing out the syscall number to a trace buffer. With a global stack, you can not only trace the syscall numbers but their call flow. The call flow graph of the syscalls in any OS is what you call the syscall graph (to make it sound deceptively simple). On Solaris you should be able to generate a syscall graph by parsing truss or dtrace output in a perl script and using a graph library. Same-thing should be possible with strace on linux.

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I am tired of seeing endless biased stories on Slashdot, Google Sci/Tech and Wired which claim to be "Tech News" feeds and stuff that "nerds" care about. Slashdot in particular has badly detoriated with time and become a Glitz and Glamour - populist news feed. Whenever Steve Jobs or Linus Torvalds sneezes, it makes the headlines on all news feeds and if Scott McNealy or Theo de Raadt die, they might be lucky to gain some attention. Today for example we had headlines saying "Apple wants to port ZFS to OSX". I don't remember any previous instance where they ever had some headline that said anything about ZFS. If Google suing Microsoft for making MSN the default search engine on IE7, demands to be the top headline, then something as revolutionary as ZFS should be a screaming bold, center, h1,#FF0000 formatted tag on every news site that claims to provide "tech" news.

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Twenty four hours ago, I wouldn't have dreamt of it. I had an awesome laptop with Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux and Windows on it. 86400 seconds later, I have gotten rid of my linux partition and made a free partition for playing around with ZFS on my laptop. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes for me. It has been about one month since I even bothered booting into Linux. FreeBSD has been my primary programming platform after OpenSolaris. Mind you, I still have a source tree of the latest Vanilla Kernel on my Solaris partition and I refer to it whenever I want to find a difference between the Solaris, FreeBSD and the Linux kernels. And if you think I adopt an "Anti-Linux" pose because I am employed by Sun or some shit like that, go, get a life.

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