Kudos to the Solaris InstallFest organizers
You call it 'laziness'. You call it 'fear of messing something up'. You call it whatever. I'd been remiss in not installing Solaris on my Toshiba Tecra laptop all these days. Had it been my personal desktop at home, I'd not have hesitated to play around with stuff like defragmenting, partitioning, installing multiple OS instances etc. But, when it came to doing the same on my laptop, I'd always reflexively backed off from experimenting!
Moinak Ghosh (no marks for guessing, it's the Belenix guy and the pride of IEC) and team must have rightly sensed that there were so many guys like me wanting to have Solaris installed on their laptops, but restrained by similar apprehensions of a 'mess-up'.
Yesterday's InstallFest event was the third in this year (yeah, due to popular demand) and their team had already installed Solaris successfully on over 150 laptops. I'd wished to register for the earlier InstallFests, but couldn't manage to do so. Nothing to regret, coz there was an added attraction this time. They were installing the Compiz 3D Desktop (a GNOME plug-in) on all laptops that had an nVIDIA graphics card.
The Himalaya conference room in IEC was abuzz, with install volunteers briskly performing pre-install, install & post-install activities on around 20 to 25 laptops of varying configurations. Minutes after I entered the room, I had a volunteer named Mayuresh tend to my laptop. First, he had my Windows XP partition shrunk to 19 GB (from 35 GB) and created a new partition using GParted LiveCD.
After installing Solaris Nevada build 64a, they installed special drivers for Yukon Ethernet card. I walked back happily to my cubicle after filling out a feedback form for the organizers and proudly displayed the 3D desktop features to my teammates.
Kudos to the entire team of volunteers and organizers of InstallFest and to Mayuresh Nirhali, Madhu K R, Moinak Ghosh, Pavan Chandrashekar & Pradhap Devarajan in particular!
