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.