The 8th National Operating System Conference of Teaching Seminar and Academic Exchange is a good starting for the OpenSolaris campaign on campus. It involved with the OS teachers from the key universities in China, THU, PKU, CAS, and etc. and the reprentatives of the press.
We did attain our goals through this conference:
o OpenSolaris promotion on campus
o Communication with the teachers
o OpenSolaris OS Course program announcement
o OpenSolaris activity survey
The keynotes of "OpenSolaris opportunities for Edu" by Michael Hayden, the Director of OPG Engineering, gave the audience a big picture of the OpenSolaris for education system and OpenSolaris strategy of Sun. After Michael's keynotes, Daniel Zhu from OPG China delivered the presentation and Dtrace demo of Dynamic Tracing OS Core. The demos show the Dtrace with vivid outlooks on the OS concepts like the process management, virtue memory, signal handling and etc. The last but not least, I gave the OpenSolaris Activities and DVD introduction, which introduces the follow-up activities like OS Course, Solaris Internal translation, Device Driver Contest. The OpenSolaris DVD includes the Solaris Express installation DVD and the other DVD consists of OpenSolaris source code, build tools and documentation.
During the Q&A session, the audience are interested in the Linux vs. OpenSolaris. And they expect that we could tailor OpenSolaris core for education and provide More tech support and exchange like Dtrace for education. Besides, some teachers are anticipating to set up OpenSolaris laboratory on their campus.
About 100 member of the OS Conference have returned their survey results and received the OpenSolaris gift including the OpenSolaris DVD and T-shirt, we could see their positive support on the OpenSolaris OS Course program. Besides, they are willing to participate in some collaborative projects based on OpenSolaris.
The next move is to define a detailed and careful plan for the OpenSolaris programs on campus. We will target to open the OpenSolaris OS course at the spring semester of 2006.
And we will have the workshop for the OS teachers starting from the week at end of November, during which we will have more talks on the technical details on the OS Courses.
Meanwhile, folks in Sun China ERI are translating the Solaris Internal (II) into Chinese, which is supposed to be published along with the original English version, at the February of 2006.
The volume of students in China is really huge. To engage the students and teachers into OpenSolaris is really critical to our OpenSolaris developer community booming. This is easily pr oven that the first user group activities has around 250 attendee which is formed by students, developers, and ERI folks.
As saying goes, Good begun, half done. Let's strive to make the OpenSolaris activities in China come true.
