Gerard's Weblog

LinuxWorld is a congress annually held in the “Jaarbeurs” in Utrecht. It focusses on Linux, OpenSource and Free Software (hi Adriaan!). The visitors are informed about the latest developments in OpenSource, learn what OpenSource solutions could reduce cost in their organizations etc. Besides the technical information shared; these type of conferences are also great to network and meet colleagues in IT.

Co-located with LinuxWorld are the conferences infosecurity.nl, Storage Expo and the Tooling event addressing IT administration and Storage. So, all four big IT events are at one location at the same time! All four events in total draw thousands of people to Utrecht. In 2008 more than 8,000 people visited the four conferences in two days.

Sun got very good feedback on their VDI demo setup running 6 Sun rays and a Demo server with Open Source software stacks. Visitors were really impressed with the freedom of choice for OpenSource workplaces which is offered with VDI. This choice of freedom is really well in line with initiatives like Nederland Open In Verbinding: an initiative of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs.

At StorageExpo the Sun stand was visited quite well. There theme was "Save Time”: fast storage, low prices. The breakout sessions on OpenStorage were packed. Both sessions had more than 60 people attending.

The Dutch OpenSolaris User Group (NLOSUG) was present as well. I gave a short presentation about OpenSolaris. What is it?, what are some of the key features?, the licensing model and how to contribute to OpenSolaris were some of the topics discussed. This talk was attended by about 30 people. Because one cannot tell everything about OpenSolaris in just 20 minutes there was a lot of talk about OpenSolaris afterwards. There was much interest in contributing to OpenSolaris using SourceJuicer, how to make an IPS package, ZFS features etc.

It is really good to see that there is so much interest in the products of Sun Microsystems and it's OpenSource solutions. The interest and popularity is growing bigger and bigger.

On october 29 the dutch Unix users group (NLUUG) organized the fall conference in congress center De Reehorst in Ede, Netherlands. This conference topic was “The Open Web”. It was to celebrate 20 years of the World Wide Web. It not only focussed on threads and challenges of today and tomorrow, but also on opportunities like integration and securing your web server with the Yubikey in combination with digital certificates.

Sun Microsystems was present with the NLOSUG; the dutch OpenSolaris User Group. The stand was manned by Kristian, Matt, Jan and myself. Kristian did an excellent job showing the advantages of Dtrace during web development. Matt showed the Snowman and Darkstar demos using the project Darkstar OpenSource gaming backend.

Many questions we got at the desk were about OpenSolaris and it's features. Much questions about ZFS, backups, DTrace and virtualization; but also much interest in how to setup a Sun Ray deployment properly, VDI and how to develop web applications using NetBeans.

On May 6 2010 the NLUUG will organize the spring conference. The title is “System Administration” and aims to extend and deepen the knowledge of system administrators. Interested in attending this conference or interested in participating? Please see the NLUUG website for more information.

23 & 24 February was the weekend in which Europe's biggest Open Source and free software meeting in Brussels (Belgium) was held: FOSDEM 2008. Sun Microsystems was present with a delegation of over 20 people demonstrating the OpenSolaris, OpenJDK, OpenOffice and virtualization solutions.

The Open Solaris stand was conveniently positioned between the Free Software Foundation and Mozilla. It was staffed with fellow NLOSUG core members (and others): Casper Dik, Joep Vesseur and Menno Lageman. Eye catcher and possibly most photographed item at the Open Solaris stand was a custom paint-brushed K Desktop Environment (KDE) Sun Ray 2 FS client. This special Sun Ray 2 FS client celebrates the one year collaboration between the KDE-Solaris community and Sun Microsystems and in particular the joint work on the port of KDE release 4 to Solaris. KDE had also one of these custom made Sun Ray 2 FS clients at their stand.

Photo: Casper Dik using the paint-brushed KDE Sun Ray 2 FS client at the KDE stand. (Photo courtesy of Dominic Cleal)

It was very good to see so much interest of FOSDEM visitors in our Sun Ray technology (especially hot desking with a live video stream!), the KDE port to Solaris and Solaris features like Dtrace, ZFS and Zones. People were also pleasantly surprised that Open Solaris actually runs on more “exotic” hardware like an Asus Eee pc or an Apple Macbook Pro running Open Solaris on bare metal. Both were displayed at the Open Solaris stand.

The Open Solaris Developer Preview 2 live CDs together with a copy of the “An Introduction to Operating Systems, A Hands-On Approach Using the OpenSolaris project” booklet were also hot items at our Open Solaris stand. It's a really good combination to get started with Open Solaris and get acquainted with it's neat features. Colleague Dr. Stefan Schneider talked late Sunday afternoon about Open Solaris Developer Preview codenamed Project Indiana. Over 50 people attended Stefan's lightning talk and absorbed details about Sun's vision on distributing future releases of Open Solaris.

Another highlight of FOSDEM 2008 was, besides the very well visited OpenJDK sessions and OpenOffice DevRoom, the presentation on the recently acquired VirtualBox virtualization technology. With ports available for Solaris, Mac OS, Microsoft Windows & a great diversity of Linux distros it's getting even easier to start with Open Solaris. ...or, even better, run your other favorite operating system(s) on top of Open Solaris!

In all, FOSDEM was a success for open source, free software & Sun Microsystems. See you all at FOSDEM 2009!