I met Quinn Storm yesterday at the Xorg Developers' Conference (which Sun is hosting). Quinn is the lead of the Beryl project. I got a demo of the window manager, and I have to say that I was mighty impressed.

Will you see Beryl up and running on OpenSolaris anytime in the near future? You can count on it!

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It's not official or final, but the preliminary results show that our own Glynn Foster has won a spot on the GNOME Foundation Board.

Congratulations, Glynn!

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There's a new JDS desktop in OpenSolaris. We've rev'ved it up to GNOME 2.16, but have also added some really cool features. Check it out and then download it from Build 53 on opensolaris.org.

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I just got back from Beijing, China, where I spent some good ol' quality time with my JDS folks there. It was nice to finally meet our new JDS manager, Zhaozhou Li, face-to-face. He's doing a fantastic job right out of the gate. Leo Binchy, another JDS manager, has extended her stay in Beijing for another 6 months, and Niall Power, a JDS engineer, is just finishing up his stay there. Mixing up the Irish and Chinese teams a bit is making a big impact. We'll have to see if we can do more of that.

One of my favorite things about visiting Beijing is getting demos of all the projects. I always know what projects are under development, but to actually see a prototype or working demo is really exciting. Of course better performance and more eye-candy is always rolling out, but some exciting new features that are coming out include:

• Vino: Remote desktop take-over

• Better multimedia support: newer Flash, newer Real Player, Fluendo, and Evince, which should resolve the problem of Adobe not wanting to port acroread to Solaris x64.

• SyncIt, a tool that allows sys admins to synchronize directories and files across machines. Useful if you want to replicate configurations. It's also useful to end users: think of it like the old Windows Briefcase, where you want to take files home with you on your laptop.

• OTR (Off-the-Record) plug-in for Gaim. A nice way to use Gaim at work without worrying about evesdroppers.

• Trusted JDS. Government-level security comes to the Gnome desktop. Freakin' sweet.

All of these are pretty far along in development, so you should be seeing them soon. Keep an eye out.... (Sorry, this is as close to talking like a pirate that I'm going to get today. I have some dignity.)

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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?)

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Stephen Browne, one of the engineers working on Trusted Extensions for Solaris, has blogged some screenshots of Trusted JDS. The big cool feature is that each individual window carries a security label with it. You can have one window that's labeled "Secret" and another labeled "Top Secret". Information can be cut & pasted from Secret to Top Secret, but not the other way around, i.e., you aren't permitted to de-classify information. Other trusted desktops do their labeling around workspaces or sessions, not individual windows.

Expect to see our new Trusted Extensions, including the Trusted Desktop, in a Solaris 10 Update sometime this fall.

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So I guess I have to expect the bad with the good, but calling JDS a " throw-away desktop"? Are you people not reading the press before you publish articles trashing us? Does Google News not exist where you live? Let me put on the cranky pants here....

Now, I've only been the director responsible for JDS at Sun for a few months now, so I admit I don't know the history around what promises were made to Tom and Sam. Sometimes things are beyond our control, but if we promised you something, we should have at least given you an explanation on why we had to break that promise. So if that's what happened, let me be the one to apologize.

As it happens, I'm also the director responsible for OpenSolaris. A "holy war on destroying Linux"?? Where the hell did that come from?! Working in the open source means you're going to have email flame wars. It's part of the business. And yes, if you have any "vulgar, profanity laced" emails from Sun engineers, I'd like to see them. I like to think our engineers are more professional than that. I can't control everything people say out there in the community, but Sun's position has never been to "destroy Linux." We're out to create our own community, a community around Solaris.

Next paragraph. OK, here's where we get to reading the news. If you bothered to read any press last week, you would have seen that we have changed our JDS/Linux strategy. Although we got a lot of kudos on our JDS/Linux distribution, a lot of people didn't like that it was based only on SUSE. We also wanted to get into more developing countries, and that means localizing it in markets SUSE isn't present in. In short, what you'll see very soon is JDS on other Linux distros.

And if you can't wait for that, JDS is now open source. You can create your own JDS based on your own distro, either Linux-based or OpenSolaris-based. Knock yourself out!

So you see, we're not throwing it away, we're expanding it! You'll also see us keeping things more up to date as well. If you have any questions, complaints, problems, whatever, feel free to let us know through the desktop discussion board on opensolaris.org.

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After some hard work, the Java Desktop System is now open on opensolaris.org! Based on Gnome 2.10, this is a newer version of the desktop than you can get on Solaris 10 today. The web pages tell you how to build it and how to contribute to it. This is a great chance to see how OpenSolaris is getting better at usability, not to mention a great way to help make OpenSolaris the premiere desktop OS out there.

Congratulations to the team for getting this out!

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I'm in Dublin, Ireland, this week meeting the newest addition to my org: the Java Desktop Group. They're doing open source and since they are closely aligned with the X server group, it made sense to move them to the Open Source Software group as well. They are a great group of folks and very excited about being part of the open source team. In fact, Glynn Foster has already created the Desktop Discussion group on opensolaris.org.

This is my first time to Dublin and I have to say it's a pretty charming city. It reminds me a bit of Portland, Oregan. There really aren't any skyscrapers, lots of shopping, and lots of pubs. It's a very old city which means there's lots of really cool architecture about. It also means the streets are narrow, very twisty, and poorly labeled. Driving without someone to navigate is a challenge, to say the least. :-)

Next stop: Home for a couple of weeks and then off to Beijing to meet the rest of the JDS team.