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

Netbeans users on Solaris and Linux, who hate, detest and despise the horrible looking default Java UI, ought to add this line to ~/.bash_profile

alias netbeans=’/opt/netbeans/bin/netbeans -laf com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel’

Update: Netbeans 6.0 users should type “–laf” instead “-laf” (Two hyphens before ‘laf’ instead of one)

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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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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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I had a chance to listen to and meet Eben Moglen, legendary professor of law and legal history at the Sun Office today. Eben had long been on the board of the FSF and is one of the key authors of the GPLv3, which happened to be one of the primary focal points of his talk today. (more…)

Linux For You, May 2007 edition shipped a Solaris Express DVD (3/07). It also had an step-by-step “How to install Solaris Express” article that I had written. As Murphy would have it, the DVD shipped with the magazine has a bug that might prevent users from installing Solaris Express to the hard disk.

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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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The Founder of Debian, Ian Murdock has joined Sun as the Chief Operating Platform Strategist. Here is the scoop from “The Register”. Apparently the name Debian is a conjunction of “Deb” and “Ian”. Deb being Ian’s girlfriend

Welcome aboard captain !

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 !

I’ve been putting this off for a long time. But I didn’t want this to end up as one of my new year resolutions. I did a complete revamp of www.belenix.org. Its now powered by Drupal. Take a look at the new site. Feedback much appreciated

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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Here is a list of posts I wrote on my official weblog about FOSS.IN/2006.
Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

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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This is by far the best news I’ve heard since June 14, 2005. The most popular technological company on earth is considering the most advanced operating system on the planet for its operations !

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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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Another feather to the DTrace cap. DTrace has been ported to MacOS !!!

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I switched my X desktop-manager in frustruation. It is one of those crazy things programmers do when they get into a spate of anxiety about productivity. GNOME is a pig to be sure and CDE sucks. I am not used to KDE and it is huge anyway. So one of the [*]boxes or Windowmaker was the best option. I ended up with fluxbox.

Take a look at the screenshot.

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What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet;

Not quite.

The other day there was a mini flame going on in one of the mail aliases (more…)

DTrace on FreeBSD has been in the news for sometime now. Even as I am typing this post, Bryan just sent out a reply on some facts about the FreeBSD port and thoughts on Linux and DTrace.

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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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