There and back again

Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away there has been OpenSolaris distribution. This was the first Unix-like desktop which allowed me to completely replace Windows on my desktop. It wasn't perfect, but a magic of ZFS and IPS made it very attractive. As we now, the sun sets... So, with the end of OpenSolaris era I've moved to FreeBSD and has never regretted about it.

But I always liked illumos and was interested in OpenIndiana distribution. So, now, when I seem to be one of the last interested in it, I tried to go back. Really, migration was smooth. I've bought Nvidia GeForce 740-based video adapter, 4 more GB of RAM and after this I was sure that my hardware is supported by OI.

OI could recognize FreeBSD ZFS pool, so I've detached one disk from zpool, installed OI Hipster from October ISO, imported data and looked at software. As always, software choice for OI if you don't want to compile it yourself is not wast. Yes, there are pkgsrc builds, but they seems foreign in IPS world. So, I used sfe and sfe-encumbered repositories for OI /dev. I hope to use vlc, but vlc 1.1 from sfe-encumbered was a complete garbage. It didn't want to play anything or when it played something it was awful (like no sound or no video or no navigation in DVD menu...) So I stopped on totem/rhythmbox combination and used additional gstreamer codecs from sfe-encumbered. This works, however you should set sfe-encumbered before sfe in your publisher's list.

When speaking about OI one should mention IIMF/IIMD and other IIIM shit. Luckily, it can be turned off. I've finished just adding setxkbmap command to the list of startup applications.

Unfortunately, our Apache OpenOffice from /hipster is still buggy, so I had to use one from AdfinisSyGroup. VirtualBox 4.3.18 from Oracle for Solaris/x64 works fine. I was pleased with our Firefox 24.8.1. Adobe flash plugin 10.1 r85 sometimes crashes. Especially annoying is that it crashes on the flash games which I have to support. At least I've expected that it would not work - the application require Flash 11+. But for other use cases it works. Having working evince, xchm and FBreader seems enough to read documentation. zpool resilvering has completed by 50%. So, now I'm eating my own dog's food.

Hipster 2014.10 is finally out

We are finally ready to present you new OpenIndiana Hipster snapshot and ISO images. We had some difficulties with generating installable "entire", so we had to delay snapshot for a week. But now you can just pkg fix entire to be more stable in constantly-changing Hipster world :) Since last snapshot a lot of work was done. I tried to summarize the changes in this informal "release notes". Please, be sure to read at least Perl-related notices before updating from previous snapshot.

General system changes

We performed migration from GCC 4.7.4 to GCC 4.8.3. New packages are compiled with GCC 4.8.4.
Perl 5.10 is not compulsory now. All perl dependencies were updated to use Perl 5.16 or don't care about perl version. This includes changes to illumos-gate. /usr/perl5/bin/perl now is mediated symlink, pointing to perl 5.16 by default. However, if you would like to compile unmodified illumos gate, you should switch it back to perl 5.10:

pkg set-mediator system-perl=5.10

Perl 5.10 modules which are required to compile illumos-gate are preserved. Other perl 5.10 modules are removed. If you have perl-510 installed on your system and don't need it, you can just remove runtime/perl-510, runtime/perl-510/extra and runtime/perl-510/module/sun-solaris.
During perl update version of perl-516/module/sun-solaris was DECREASED from 5.11 to 0.5.11 for consistency with other illumos-gate provided software. So if you have installed it, please, remove it BEFORE updating to new Hipster snapshot.
Perl 5.16 was recompiled without -Dperl_static_inline="static" flag to avoid creating one more patch for illumos-gate (this can affect perl ABI). So, if you had self-compiled perl modules, possibly, you have to recompile them.
Also, for consistency we renamed library/perl-5/xml-parser@5.12.1-0.151.1.8.1 to library/perl-5/xml-parser@2.41. So, if you have it installed (and every desktop system has it), please update it to library/perl-5/xml-parser@2.41,5.11-2014.1.2.0 (pkg update library/perl-5/xml-parser@2.41,5.11-2014.1.2.0). Also you'll have to update desktop/system-monitor/gnome-system-monitor if you have it installed.

Development tools and compilers

• OpenJDK was updated to 1.7.60. GCC 4.7 was updated to 4.7.4. GCC 4.8.3 and Clang 3.4 were added.
• GDB was updated to 7.6.2
• Mercurial was updated to 3.0.2
• MPICH was updated to 3.1.2
• ant was updated to 1.9.3
• python 2.7 was updated to 2.7.8

Common software

• bash was updated to fix latest bash CVEs, GNU coreutils were updated to 8.22, CUPS updated to 1.4.8, doxygen updated to 1.8.7, GNU grep was updated to 2.20, gnupg to 2.0.25
• Several packages to work with numerical data were added (datamash, hdf5)

Server software

• A lot of packages were updated, including apache 2.4, apache 2.2, nginx, php 5.4, php 5.5, squid 3.1, tomcat 6.0, postgresql 8.4/9.3
• Ldap backend was enabled for OpenLDAP server.
• Illumos-gate provided wu-ftpd was replaced with proftpd 1.3.5
• Barman was updated to 1.3.3
• NTP was updated to 4.2.7p453
• Bind was updated to 9.9.6

Desktop software

• Firefox and Thunderbird were updated to 24.8.1
• Packages from sic-team incorporation (notably, Mozilla nss and nspr) were updated.
• glib-networking, webkit were added
• Experimental package for Apache OpenOffice 4.1.1 was added. There is known issue with it - it can't create ODF documents. We are working on it.
• ntfsprogs were updated to 2014.2.15 version
• DJVU support was added to evince
• Gnome-pilot and Gnome-pilot-link packages are obsolete now as upstream is dead.

Also there were lot of other small fixes.

As always we ship the newest illumos-gate version, so you can leverage the great work of illumos developers.

Last time I blogged about Hipster I shared some plans. From things which were planned but not made I have to point to integration of new Perl version and 64-bit Perl version. Also we didn't add vlc and other multimedia software to oi-userland because of legal issues. We still miss fsvs. However, I hope we'll find decision for this problem soon.

Now I'd like to share my current plans, the things I'm interested in and the things I'm working on.

First of all, I'd like to look at OpenOffice issue with ODF files. It seriously bugs me, but I don't know if and when I'll be able to solve it.

One thing which annoys me in OpenIndiana desktop is lack of text search in gnome terminal. I have prepared update to gnome-terminal 2.32. It's coming soon.

Also I'd like to look at migration of some XNV components to oi-userland. This should allow us to enhance their packaging (so that it better correlates with oi-userland build system) and later I hope to update it.

I'm seriously annoyed by our out-of-date sendmail, coming from illumos-gate. I'd like to see postfix as a first-class OI MTA. Of course, we'll also need dovecot and perhaps some other mail server software.

Finding security patches for our squid 3.1 is becoming harder. Perhaps we have to update it to recent 3.4 version and also receive SMP support as a pleasant triffle.

PostgreSQL 9.4 release is coming. I want to have it in the gate. On other hand, I think we should remove PostgreSQL 8.4 once 9.4 is landed. PostgreSQL 8.4 has already reached its EOL.

PHP 5.6 is already out. I think, we'll get it soon. As always I hope to use EveryCity's work :)

Our Ruby is amazingly old. We have to migrate to at least ruby 1.9. Ruby 1.9 package is ready and just waiting for official snapshot announcement

I'd like to see some binary blobs disappearing from OI Hipster - like cpp (we can use Joyent version), also I hope once we'll have open source gcc-compiled dmake alternative.

Adding dpkg/apt tools and support for DilOS zones in OI seems attractive and perhaps even necessary thing if we want to better collaborate with DilOS on userland packages.