IPS on BeleniX 0.7

For those who use BeleniX and are interested to play around with the Image Packaging System (IPS), getting it to work on BeleniX is fairly simple. Here are the steps:

• Install SUNWspro: Download the binary tarball and untar it into /opt/SUNWspro so that the compiler is available at /opt/SUNWspro/bin
• Set the PATH variable: Remove the /usr/gnu/bin and add /opt/SUNWspro/bin (my PATH is /opt/SUNWspro/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/sfw/bin)
• Pull the ips sources from the ips-gate at opensolaris.org
• $ mkdir ws ; cd ws
• $ hg clone ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/pkg/gate ips-gate
• Build the ips sources
• $ cd ips-gate/src
• $ make
• $ make install
• The installable SVR4 package consisting of IPS components is now available. On my box it is,
• $ ls ../packages/i386

The package includes both the client (pkg, pkgrecv, pkgsend) and server (pkg.depotd) components.

There is an excellent tutorial on IPS by Michal Pryc at http://blogs.sun.com/migi/entry/create_your_own_opensolaris_ips2

After being through with the above tutorial, for those interested in the implementation details, the next step would be to go through the documented information at <ips-gate>/doc and code at <ips-gate>/src

OpenSolaris 2008.05 is now released !

Project Indiana at opensolaris.org has delivered the distribution OpenSolaris 2008.05

The official release was made today morning at the CommunityOne conference being held in San Francisco from where I am posting this.

This is an important milestone in the evolution of the opensolaris community !

Congratulations to all those from the opensolaris community and from within SUN to have made this possible.

Lot of interesting & fantastic technologies covering areas such as virtualization, storage, dynamic debugging framework, package management (zones,zfs,dtrace,ips,...) etc, that one can try out and put to use using the distro. The distro may be downloaded here.

First BOSUG meet after BeleniX 0.7

Yesterday, we (BOSUG - Bangalore OpenSolaris User Group) held our first meeting after the release of BeleniX 0.7
It was an occasion to celebrate.

There were a few new people attending the meeting & interested in knowing what opensolaris was all about and how the community operated. We had a fairly lengthy discussion covering a wide range of topics.

The UG kits had arrived recently and the participants were provided with the same.

Snaps are available at flickr

Additional softwares/packages for BeleniX 0.7

The default installation of BeleniX 0.7 bundles a whole bunch of softwares to address most of the needs of a desktop user.
If the system is connected to the net, there are many more packages available for installation at a command's distance using the get-pkgs command.
To display the different clusters of packages available for installation, try
$ get-pkgs
** Fetching catalog ...
--12:09:42-- http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/binfiles/extra_packages/catalog
=> `/tmp/get-pkg/catalog'
Resolving www.genunix.org... 204.152.191.100
Connecting to www.genunix.org|204.152.191.100|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 307 [text/plain]

0K 100% 6.34 MB/s

12:09:43 (6.34 MB/s) - `/tmp/get-pkg/catalog' saved [307/307]

Usage: get-pkg <cluster>

Where <cluster> can be one of the following:
devel - Development headers and GCC
kde_extra - Additional KDE packages like Kdevelop, Kdeedu etc.
amp - Apache MySQL PHP
gnome_extra - Extra GNOME stuff and Gimp
java - JDK5, JAM and Ant
l10n - Localization packages
misc - Miscellaneous packages like Quagga, Evolution, Storage drivers etc.
postgres - PostgreSQL packages

The different clusters of packages shown above are "as of now". Execute the command as above to get the up-to-date list at any given point of time.
Those interested in having a tool chain for performing builds would need to install the devel cluster. To install the devel cluste, as root user, execute

$ get-pkgs devel

For those interested in knowing the list of packages in a cluster, the file for the individual cluster is stored as /var/tmp/get-pkgs/<cluster-name>

To have a pkgbuild environment for building the spec files

• Install the devel cluster using get-pkgs
  
• Download and install Sun Studio 11
• Download JDS CBE and Install CBEpkgbuild(along with the mandatory dependencies)
• Modify your user .bashrc to source /opt/jdsbld/bin/envsh
  

Now you are ready to build your way into the hundreds of softwares available via the various spec files repositories.

The get-pkgs facility for pulling and installing softwares is a stop gap arrangement till we have a network repository of our own.

BeleniX 0.7 is released !

Yesterday, I sent out the announcement of BeleniX 0.7 release.

A simple demo of the LiveCD, the softwares available in the LiveCD and the installation process is availabe here. (~7.5mb flash file, will take sometime)

Try it out, provide feedback, contribute to BeleniX...