FrankC's Blog: Things happened around me

The web link solution was revisited when another brilliant engineer joined the team. Java web start technology was evaluated and found it's a perfect fit to this product. Then we put together the old prototypes developed for Windows and Linux platform, part of the code from installation check tool, we got the first working prototype of the web link solution.

A prototype is only a prototype. It's still far from being a product. Then several other brilliant engineers joined to help enhance the GUI look and feel, review the code, test the product, write the document and go through legal processes. Finally on Oct, 26 2006, the first release of Sun Device Detection Tool was out. The download number is more than 3000 in one month. We are really encouraged by that number. We also received many good feedbacks from community users and Sun internal users.

With a good starting point, we continue to improve this product to deliver more functions to users. A local version was developed and integrated into Solaris Express Developer Edition DVD. So user could run this software on systems that have no internet access. In 1.1 release, user could check driver availability again multiple Solaris versions. In 1.2 release, this tool is connected with Sun HCL. If this tool is started in an official release of Solaris OS, user could submit the system information collected by this tool to Sun for auditing. If approved, this system could be listed on the HCL in the 'Reported to Work' category. In 2.0 release, more Windows and Linux platforms are supported. With that release, all major Windows, Linux and Solaris distributions are supported by the Sun Device Detection Tool. We are really proud of that.