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. |  |
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!