A Tech Writer's Weblog OpenSolaris Docs

At the FOSDEM conference in Brussls, Belgium yesterday, we distributed 300 OpenSolaris Starter Kits to the many students here. It was a very exciting day with Simon's Keynote getting good reception and a lot of interest at our booth all day long. So many of the attendees have not used Solaris at all and many still do not know it works well on x86 hardware. As compared to LinuxWorld and SIGCSE conferences, this audience is far younger with most visitors in early twenties and many more having at least heard of OpenSolairs before. We have OpenSolaris running on Mac mini and Solaris Express CE and Belenix on x86 laptops for demonstration. The Mac mini brings most scratching heads and begins the conversations quite well.

The discussion typically then turns to the previous experience with Solaris each attendee might have, their willingness to try it out and, in many cases, difficulty with an installation attempt. We did also have a couple of interesting questions that could imply some documentation needs, as follows:

scenario: User just bought, installed, and configured T2000 Niagara box, wondered how to automate the updates through updatemanager, using command line.

scenario: User has a need to change the hostname for a particular machine on their network, but cannot figure out the way. Answer was to change /etc/nodename. One might think /etc/hostname, but answer is nodename, so maybe this difference could be made more explicit in the information?

In general, there has been an incredible amount of excitement about the Starter Kits, the LiveCDs continue to be a real hit and always people are impressed to see that they exist and can be had for free. In addition, at least 10% of the interested attendees yesterday said that they had already ordered a Starter Kit from the internet about a month ago when they saw the information on slashdot. Unfortunately, no one has actually received the kit they ordered yet, so they are happy to get a copy.

I've met many other contacts this week and had many discussions of curriculum, folks in Holland interested in full-blown four-year University curriculum for OpenSolaris, based on the interest and excitement around the Introduction to Operating Systems: A Hands-On Approach Using the OpenSolaris Project document we developed for the Academic and Research community. I will detail the conversation in another blog, because it is worth more time to relay all of the thoughts on the subject of courseware. We also share our booth with the OpenJDK group, so I've had many conversations about development of a Starter Kit for that project, the time to develop it and the appropriate contacts for getting a OpenJDK kit underway. More to come on that and what types of information it might provide.