The JumpStart Workshop on Solaris conducted by Sun in partnership with NIIT's sun certified trainers has been executed as a 4 day workshop at JIIT. The workshop was rescheduled and stretched over a period of 4 days with the theory sessions conducted from January 24th through January 26th and the final practical (lab) session on this Monday (January 28th).

The general response for the workshop has been better than expected. We had received 54 registrations for the Solaris track and half the number for the Java track. The course started from a basic level understanding of working with unix system shells, common unix and solaris commands all the way upto access control lists in Solaris,etc. The course content was provided by Sun Learning Services. All students were given the SLS course handbook along with an SXDE DVD to install Solaris on their comps at home.

There was slight miscommunication on the part of NIIT on the first day though. They did not mention the requirement of having a Solaris workstation ready in the lecture theatre. The machine in the lecture theatre was way too slow for a Solaris installation and so remote session to a windows box with a solaris VM saved the day (and the rest of the lecture sessions too).

On the last day of the workshop, we had a lab session in CL4 (the one where we had the installfest). This lab session required all those 47 computers in the lab to have Solaris running on them, which wasn't possible owing to their hardware configuration (512 MB of RAM and no space left for installation). This in turn presented itself as a great opportunity for me to tinker of smart ways to get up Solaris running on them without actually installing it. More on that in the next blog post :)

• Photos from the lecture sessions
• Photos from the lab session