Hello World

Hello World,

My name is Michael Kruger and I created this blog to chronicle my journey through the wonderful world of open source software. In particular I volunteered in late December of 2015 to help with writing systems documentation for the OpenIndiana project. 

OpenIndiana is derived from OpenSolaris and is essentially a fully community based continuation of the OpenSolaris project, which itself was the testbed (Think Fedora) for what later became Oracle Solaris 11.

OpenIndiana shares most of the technologies found in Oracle Solaris 11, but is completely open source as it uses the illumos kernel rather than Sun/Oracle's proprietary OS/Net consolidation. In a nutshell, illumos is OS/NET with all the proprietary bits removed and rewritten to be entirely open source.

And now for a little bit about me. While not a developer, I have done a dash of bash and sprinkle of powershell scripting here and there. I also have some modest technical writing experience, and some exposure to the software development process in general (and software configuration management in particular).

To round it all off, I have toyed around a little bit with version control systems (subversion), and in support of the OpenIndiana project, am now teaching myself how to use GIT, GitHub, etc., along with remembering everything I have forgotten about how to use VIM. Oh yes, there is also text markup. I am teaching myself how to write in Asciidoc (well actually the Ruby implementation of Asciiidoc, which is called Asciidoctor).

I also have roughly 15 years experience supporting Windows desktops and servers (mostly desktops). A couple of those years included working with Vmware Vsphere, Redhat Enterprise Linux, and even some UNIX (HP-UX and Solaris). 

Most of what I expect to do as a contributing member of the OpenIndiana project is help with writing tutorials, producing a nice polished (BSD like) OpenIndiana handbook, as well as assisting with the ground up development of an all new documentation toolchain (ideally something text markup based and completely automated by means of continuous integration).

The current OpenSolaris docs (books) were all written in Solbook (a subset of docbook) and have a rather nasty toolchain. My hope is to someday see all these books converted to Asciidoc (plain text markup) as docbook is a real bear to work with. 

Michael