Virtuality

Virtuality
It's like reality, but not as substantial

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Thursday October 13, 2005

Solaris 10 Talk

Last night I gave a talk* at the West Yorkshire BCS group about Solaris 10.

About 50 people attended the talk, which was more than I expected and came as a bit of a surprise. I took a quick poll before I started to talk and learned that:

20(ish) used Solaris on a daily basis
0 used Solaris 10
5 used Solaris 9
(The rest) used Solaris 7/8
1 used Solaris 2.6

It looks like we need to do some active encouragement of our user base to upgrade!

The talk was about an hour long and seemed to be well received. It wasn't terribly technical, as I didn't think that would be appropriate for the audience, but I concentrated on introducing four main areas of Solaris 10: Resource Management (including zones), DTrace, Predictive Self Healing, Privileges. I also briefly covered other areas and quickly plugged OpenSolaris. Questions centered on: Dtrace/Resource Management performance impact, wireless drivers, installation problems and the availability of the next release.

The BCS committee told me that they thought the talk had gone well and I was personally satisfied that I'd managed to generate some interest in Solaris. I was a little disappointed that there were so few detailed technical questions. Also disappointing was the realisation that hardly anyone, even in the BCS, used a version of Solaris newer than five years old!

*Thanks to Jim Mauro for providing the bulk of the slides that I used for the talk and to Bryan Cantrill whose DTrace slides I stole and re-hashed mercilessly.

(2005-10-13 05:14:08.0) Permalink Comments [5]

Wednesday October 05, 2005

Solaris 10 in West Yorkshire

I'll be giving a talk on Solaris 10 next Wednesday (12th October) at my local British Computer Society (BCS) branch meeting. If you are in the area and want to talk about Solaris, then drop by and say hello.

You can get more details on the talk here

Update: I've managed to wangle some free t-shirts out of Sun Marketing and will be giving them away to attendees according to some arbitrary and as yet undefined criteria. Suggestions for said criteria are encouraged.

(2005-10-05 05:07:17.0) Permalink Comments [1]