Alan Perry's Blog

Thursday March 08, 2007

The OpenSolaris Developers Conference

A week ago, I was in Berlin, Germany for the first OpenSolaris Developers Conference. I was there to present a paper that I wrote that describes my effort to port OpenSolaris to the Apple Mac Mini and port MythTV to OpenSolaris. This is part of a longer term personal project to build an OpenSolaris-based set-top box from ordinary PC hardware (look inside a Mac Mini and you will see that the component are ordinary PC components).

The conference was presented by the German Unix Users Group (GUUG) and was co-located with their Spring 2007 meeting. The organizers tell me that about 35-40 people were there for the OpenSolaris conference.

I thought the conference was very well done. The technical content was very good. The presentations were engaging. And, while most of the presenters were from Sun, many weren't and the conference was organized by the GUUG, not Sun.

My favorite presentation was made by Moinak Ghosh from Sun. He is the guy behind the Belenix distribution of OpenSolaris and he spoke about creating Live Media. When I first saw Belenix last year, I was surprised that it could fit on a CD and boot so quickly. It was very interesting to learn how it works. Moinak is a very clever guy.

The conference organizers tell me that there will be an OpenSolaris Developers Conference next year and I will be definitely be there.

( Mar 08 2007, 10:16:42 AM PST ) Permalink