On May 23rd 2008, I had made a trip to another CA university located in around central Delhi, Indira Gandhi Institute of Technology. I was invited by Anwesha, the Sun Campus Ambassador of IGIT to speak at their university's Sun Corona Day event. I was most delighted to be there to give that talk, especially because of the topic that I chose this time, OpenSolaris 2008.05 :)

I had been wanting to talk about OpenSolaris since quite some time now. I had ventured into this great piece of technology only recently, around 4-5 months back, and since then have explored almost every length and breadth of possibilities with it. OpenSolaris is a great OS. It's different. They say it's a better Linux than Linux? I say it shouldn't even be compared to Linux. It has its own role to play, and it's own shoes to fit in.

Me	Ankit	Anwesha

It rained heavily in Delhi, the night before, and as such, the roads were flooded with water. At once such point there was just too much water and the public services were pumping out the water. I got stuck there and as a result got a little late for the talk, though Anwesha got it covered up by letting Ankit speak on Netbeans first. When I got there, I sat and listened to Ankit's talk on Netbeans while mentally preparing myself for mine. I guess it happened for the good.

At the end of his talk, Ankit was kind enough to call me on stage to tell something about my regular expression plugin. I told them, and also couldn't help myself to talk something about Netbeans too while I was there. I whole heartedly proclaimed that Netbeans is now not just a Java IDE anymore, and that it has come to become the "Grand Unified IDE", which allows you to do development in any language and features any IDE you could imagine.

It's really important to connect with the audience. It's important to relate the topic to them, to their circumstance, their needs. Its equally important to express the importance of the topic and its relevance to the audience before starting off. From that stand point, my topic wasn't really easy, as in this hall were sitting 80+ students, mostly from the 1st and 2nd year of college, most of whom have not even heard of Solaris, and haven't tried a lot of linuxing either. At the same time, my topic was easy as I was totally focused on OpenSolaris in the recent past, my thoughts were crystal clear, I was passionate about it from inside, and with the recent launch of OpenSolaris 2008.05, I was well motivated for the talk!

I was well prepared. I had been reading the reviews. I knew all about Solaris. I was well motivated. And, it do go pretty well :)

I started off the talk asking a very simple question - What's the difference between Free and Open Source. Free means free in value, free in freedom. Somebody said "some software whose source is available to explore". That's quite true. In simple terms, Open Source just means that. But in the true deep sense, open source has come to mean a lot more than just the source code being openly available. It has more of a philanthropic and social meaning. Something open source is something, around which, exists a community. Something that has a special connection with people. Something which people can own, equally. OpenSolaris is one such open source community.

As I enquired that most of the audience atleast knew what Linux is and what is its advantage over proprietary operating systems, I had no need to describe that. What I then needed to explain was that.. alright, we've always used windows, then we were inspired to use Linux, as a much better, scientific and open way of computing, now why Solaris? I needed to explain the value proposition of Solaris over Linux, then the value proposition of OpenSolaris over Solaris, and THEN the value proposition of OpenSolaris 2008.05 over OpenSolaris! It certainly was a long way to go, but it sure was fun!

So, how is Solaris better than Linux? To start with, I talked about the robust stability and security offered by the operating system. Solaris is a military-grade system. It is used on government servers and places where ultimate reliability must be guaranteed at any cost. Solaris is such an operating system with features such as Solaris Trusted Extensions. I talked about its use in real time systems and the examples from JavaONE - the autonomous vehicle (AUV) and project blue wonder, demonstrated in James Gosling's toy show on the last day, both, running Solaris. Real time systems like these need the most reliable, most responsive, most efficient underlying system, as even a split second delay can lead to undesired / catastrophic results. But Solaris goes way beyond just being a trusted and reliable operating system. It has some very unique profound features, namely ZFS, Zone, Dtrace - 3 jewels on its crown. I gave them a brief overview of the 3 as I wanted to delve further into each one of them individually in my presentation. I had some very cool stuff to show them, I began with the presentation. In the ZFS part, I showed them the shocking disk smashing demo shown at CommunityOne, at the OpenSolaris 2008.05 launch keynote by Rich Green. Everyone was very impressed with that. I told them about Belenix and its vital role in the development of the LiveCD infrastructure of OpenSolaris 2008.05. I also told them about the newest innovations in the OpenSolaris community, namely Milax, Crossbow, etc.

I also hit on a point which Abhishek has brought up about OpenSolaris recently, about it being a very RAW platform and a newer community, thus providing a lot of opportunity to developers, and also about it being a very good operating system from which we can study OS concepts really well.

The most exciting part of the presentation, ofcourse, was the OpenSolaris 2008.05 part. OpenSolaris 2008.05 is great - Slim Install, LiveCD, Image Packaging System, Modern Installer, GNOME 2.22 interface, first to have ZFS as root filesystem, goodness of good ol' Solaris features, Amazon EC2 availability, and best of all - being the first OpenSolaris distro to be fully supported by Sun! I told them about the issues with OpenSolaris uptil now (both community issues and technological issues) and what is the new way forward post Ian Murdock joining Sun. OpenSolaris 2008.05 brings together best of both the GNU/Linux and OpenSolaris worlds together in synergy to give you the hardcore features of Solaris and the ease of installation, ease of use, and package management provided by the Linux world fused into one OS. It was a pleasure announcing all new and exciting achievements in this new face of OpenSolaris, followed by a screenshot based demo of its installation.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get OpenSolaris 2008.05 to give a presentable display to the projector, as there was some glitch with nvidia settings which just allowed resolution upto 640x480 on the external display in TwinView mode. I had known how to fix to this in SXDE, but it didn't work in OpenSolaris 2008.05, so I couldn't show them the out-of-the-box Compiz experience on the projector. Though I did invite to show it to them on my laptop after the talk :)

This problem aside, the talk went pretty well. It's the most passionate talk I've ever given. I'm glad I did :)

Anwesha coordinated the event very professionally. After my talk, there was a java quiz, followed by announcement of results, conclusion of Corona, and a small photo session..

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