A shout out to our new friends in Seattle and Shanghai. Both cities now have their own OpenSolaris User Groups. The user groups are a great way to meet other OpenSolaris users, learn about new features, tips, and tricks, and share your ideas.

You can find more information about the Seattle User Group here and the Shanghai User group here (though you'll need to be able to read Chinese).

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

Sun Tech Days are Sun's Developer Conference. They are given around the world. The next one is in Seattle, September 6-8, 2006. If you're a developer, this is a good way to learn about developing with OpenSolaris, Solaris, NetBeans, Java, and all our developer tools.

The first day, September 6th, is devoted to OpenSolaris and NetBeans. The OpenSolaris portion will cover the following topics:

• Building and Deploying OpenSolaris
• Virtualization
• Security
• POD: Performance, Observability, and Debugging

Our own Stephen Hahn will be presenting there, so make sure you get a chance to hear him and meet him. He always wears a tie, so he's pretty easy to spot.

Future Tech Days, with OpenSolaris Days, will be Shanghai September 22-24, and Beijing September 27-29. You can find the full calendar here. (I'll be at the Atlanta one in case you were wondering....)

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

Called "potshots" because they were smoking pot when they made them.

Dan, buddy, you need to go have a talk with that programmer you assigned to watch over us. He's not paying attention. I hate to tell managers how to manage their employees, but really, the guy hasn't looked at opensolaris.org at all. The community sees everything. Our designs are going on in the open -- just look at any of the communities. We even have a site for code reviews. If you can find something we should be doing better, please tell me. We're always looking at ways to improve our site.

The crowning moment of the article, though, is Dan complaining that "Sun holds [OpenSolaris] behind the firewall" in one breath, and then saying that "there would be no point to making AIX open-source" in the next.

Too funny, Dan.

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

So lots of people are making fun of the term "Web 2.0". Well, at least Nick Douglas over at Valleywag is. I have to admit, the term is becoming rather uncool.

Nevertheless, Techcrunch has an interesting documentary about the Web 2.0 bubble, or lack there-of. Worth watching....

Rich McDougall's and Jim Mauro's new book, Solaris Internals: Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Kernel Architecture (2nd Edition) is now out! If you are finding it hard to slog through the source code, here's a great reference text that explains why things are done. This is the book we give to new employees here at Sun. Check it out....

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

A few weeks ago was the Czech Republic Championship in Programming for Young People. This event is an opportunity for the brightest young programmers in the Czech Republic to get together and talk with engineers from companies such as Sun. Naturally, we had lots to say about OpenSolaris and NetBeans, and the folks were quite interested, particularly in features like DTrace.

Tomas Heran's blog and Roumen Strobl's blog have lots of pictures and a complete description of the event. Check it out.....

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

My friend, mentor, and former boss, Lisa Pavey, is the VP of engineering at Tesla Motors, so I've been following them for a while now. This week is their launch, along with a nice article about their roadster in Wired News. Very cool! Nice work, Lisa!

OSCON, O'Reilly's open source convention, starts next week in Portland, OR. Sadly, I'm stuck here in California, but make sure you catch the following if you go:

• Simon Phipps's keynote address, The Zen of Free (Thursday)
• The session on Sun's Open Source Strategy (Thursday)
• OpenSolaris Virtualization BoF (Wednesday)
• Discuss Sun's Open Source Strategy, the DLJ and Java BoF (Thursday)
• Consolidating Servers with OpenSolaris, ZFS and Zones BoF (Thursday)

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

Solaris 10 6/06 (aka "Update 2") has been released! New features include:

• ZFS
• Predictive Self-Healing for x64 and x86 systems
• Sun Update Connection
• IPv6 support for IPFilter
• UDP and TCP performance improvements
• PCI Express support on x86 systems
• RealPlayer
• PostgresSQL database

A huge congratulations to the team for making this happen! Many people don't realize how much time and effort it takes to release an update. People work around the clock and on weekends to pull these things off. It's a tremendous effort and something that couldn't be done without everyone working together as a team. Thank you all.

Technorati Tags: Solaris, ZFS

Good article on page 34 in Brown University's Conduit interviewing Adam Leventhal about DTrace and BrandZ. Now if we could only get Adam to smile.... :-)

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

Nice summary of why you'll want to use ZFS over on Tech-Recipes. Already in OpenSolaris, ZFS will debut in Solaris in the 6/06 (aka "Update 2") release due out next week.

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris, ZFS

Chris Ratcliffe (Solaris marketing), Tom Goguen (his boss), Josh Berkus (Postgres engineering), and I, had a nice dinner with some customers and the press on Monday to talk about the 1 year anniversary of OpenSolaris and some other interesting Solaris facts & figures. The round-up below:

• OpenSolaris Celebrates First Anniversary
• OpenSolaris: Success Story, or Too Soon to Say?
• Sun's 5,000 layoffs and 5 million OpenSolaris downloads
• Sun CEO will announce thousands of layoffs this Thursday
• Sun Solaris Embraces PostgreSQL
• OpenSolaris: One Year Down, Participation Up
• OpenSolaris Turns One
• Happy Birthday OpenSolaris

We didn't talk at all about the pending lay-offs. First, it's not appropriate, and second, we don't know a damn thing about them. But it looks like some reporters haven't forgotten the first rule of journalism: Open with a title that will hook the reader. Sigh.

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

OpenSolaris: One Year Down, Participation Up

For the record, I wasn't going to guess how many lines of codes are in OpenSolaris. Ratcliffe threw that 5 million lines number out there. Still, it's a good article. Thanks, Timothy!

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

The direction of our desktop is to get more developers developing for Solaris on Solaris. More tools. More languages. More things developers want. More things developers need.

For a sneek peek into some of the things we're working on, check out John Rice's Blog. Better yet, join the JDS community!

(You knew I was going to say that, right?)

Technorati Tags: JDS

One year. Wow. It feels so much longer.

So much has happened over the past year. What's gone right? What's gone wrong? What blew me away? What depressed the hell out of me?

Well, what went right is that we started conversations, conversations with folks that have never talked to Sun before. We're going places we've never been. We've raised awareness. The biggest worry I had just before the launch was, what if nobody noticed or cared? Well, that certainly wasn't the case!

What went wrong? Not much actually. I credit that to our pilot program, the CAB, and all of our supporters out there. Of course, my fabulous team played a big part. They delivered -- and how.

Of course, I was hoping we would have the source code management solution up and running by now, but the transition is turning out to be harder than we thought. That's not a "gone wrong" thing, but a "hasn't happened as fast as I'd hoped" thing. Nevertheless, we're making good progress and the betas are up on our web site.

What blew me away? Winning the SIIA Codie Award for best open source solution. Our traction with universities have blown me away as well. Thirty-two universities are using OpenSolaris in their cirriculum. Five are Centers of Excellence.

What's depressed me? Well... nothing. (OK, there was this record rainfall in March that depressed the hell out of me, truth be told.)

Finally, I want to thank everyone out there that believes in OpenSolaris. We couldn't have done this alone.

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris