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On the second day of the FOSDEM conference we distributed the remaining 200 OpenSolaris Starter Kits, for a total of 500, and word-of-mouth was very good. We had many students coming to the both specifically for the kits and we ran out before the day's end. We might have been able to distribute yet another 100 kits based on the high interest.

I was pleased that, at FOSDEM, most visitors to our booth knew about OpenSolaris and had questions that indicated some previous knowledge of the project. The most frequent question was not 'what is the difference between Solaris and OpenSolaris?', as was the case at LinuxWorld and SIGCSE last year. At FOSDEM, the question was 'why should I use OpenSolaris instead of Linux?' For me, this is a much easier question to address, frankly. It also demonstrated to me that almost all of the visitors to our booth have working knowledge of Linux and have used it, in its many flavors, extensively for some time.

So, why should one use OpenSolaris instead?

-Observability tools;
DTrace provides extensive debugging of the system and applications. It is available on Mac OSX and a project is underway to port it to PowerPC. If there was an interest, a demonstration of simple DTrace outputs was helpful to most developers.

-Virtualization;
Zones, containers, and resource management components in OpenSolaris provide virtualization infrastructure to enable a huge number of development environments on a single machine. This technology likewise provides isolation of processes and applications for testing. Branded zones enable one to run applications optimized on other platforms, on the OpenSolaris platform, to take advantage of unique OpenSolaris tools.

-File System;
ZFS is a revolutionary file system that is easy to administer and eliminates the need for volume management. Most students knew about ZFS and have heard incredible stories from peers about the functionality.

-Security;
Role-based access controls in OpenSolaris enable secure separation of rights for fine grained management of privileges. New user interfaces for privilege setup and configuration make this concept easy to understand and implement on-the-fly. Trusted extensions enable process-level controls for each running instance per session, so an individual process is restricted by its trusted meta-data assignment, not only by the privileges assigned to a particular user.

-Java;
OpenSolaris includes complete integration of the latest Java Runtime Environment.

-Documentation;
OpenSolaris provides documented support for all active features of the operating system, comprising thousands of man pages and hundreds of technical developer and administrator manuals. The Documentation community provides source files for the most active of these documents so you are able to customize the information to your needs, feedback on documentation usability and accuracy, or request to participate in new information development. Extensive training and certification programs exist for Solaris administration and development in addition to excellent free online training, articles, and lively forums that give you access to the experts and supportive communities of all types of users and developers of emerging technologies.