Finally :) Go and check out http://www.opensolaris.com/index.html
We Solaris Desktop team integrated GNOME 2.24 into it. We also provided a lot of FOSS packages so that you don't need to build by yourself, such as XSane, Brasero, Bluefish, Songbird, Cheese and Meta Tracker .
The IPS Software Package Manager GUI is improved. NWAM (network automatic) is working better than last release. The new ZFS based time slider will save you a lot of trouble. The overall UI is also looking better.
The first ever GNOME.Asia Summit was held at the Beihang university, Beijing, China, Oct 18th-19th, 2008. Totally about 350 participants attended this Summit. There were 42 speakers, 70% are local speakers and 30% oversea speakers from USA, Finland, Singapore and HK. Sun was gold sponsor as well as co-organizer for this event. Lots of topics were discussed in this Summit: Accessibility, Mobile, i18n, Community, Development, Testing and Deployment. Sun is acting as a leader to build the GNOME community in Asia. The Summit is a good beginning. After the Summit, we are going to build Beijing GNOME User Group
to have a better GNOME community in China and Asia.
Robert O'Dea, Brian Cameron and Willie Walker visited Sun JDS Beijing office in October. They were here for the GNOME.Asia
Summit as well as for better communication with local engineers in Beijing. Lots of discussion, meetings and forums were held this
month. Welcome to Beijing.
Robert O’Dea hosted an all hands meeting of OpenSolaris Desktop China team on Oct. 22nd. He reviewed the team achievement in the past year and shared the perspective for the coming year. He thought the team was getting mature and believed it would be better in future.
JDS team went to Fenghuangling Nature Park in the late autumn of the Beijing for team building. The Fenghuangling Nature Park embraced by forests is located in the northwest of Haidian district. All of us were impressed by the beautiful view, fresh air and less people (comparing with Fragrant Hills). Finally, everyone enjoyed a mutton hotpot lunch. We had another successful team building this year.
As you know, we have donated our event budget to Si Chuan Earthquake, which is meaningful to all of us. Given this, we still would like
to create an opportunity to gather people together to a simple but memorial anniversary celebration. Group picture was the expected
part. We took group picture around 4:00 pm on Oct. 20th at the square in front of the Sunny Hall, Tsinghua Science Park.
Six years have passed since I joined Sun. I grew from MTS-1 to Staff Engineer last year, step by step. I switched my role to Engineering Manger since late March, this year. I have got great help and support from various people and the team members. Many of them have left Sun. I'd like to thank them all here.
Here is a brief summary of what my team did for FY08.
1. Team integrated Accerciser into Nevada 75, RealPlayer 11 into Nevada 90, gnome-power-manager into Nevada 92, Installer's new timezone selector into OpenSolaris 2008.05, Meta tracker 0.6.6 into
Vermillion 88 (will be in Nevada 98).
2. Team Maintained projects: Integrated latest stable Evolution, GNOME A11Y Infrastructure(atk, gail, at-spi, java-access-bridge), some GNOME multimedia apps (Totem, Rhythmbox, etc), vino, palm-sync, pidgin into Nevada 92,
3. Team integrated 3 Indiana Packages for 2008.05 release: libgc, glibmm, gmime.
4. GNOME 2.22 ARC team finished the ARC process successfully. Team Lead: Jedy Wang. Members: Jerry(Jijun) Yu, Li Yuan, Irene Huang, Brian Cameron.
From http://blogs.adobe.com/acroread/2008/05/adobe_reader_on_solaris_x86_co.html
"After receiving hundreds of requests from users of Adobe Reader to
release a version on Solaris x86 platform, here's something all of you
have been waiting to hear - yes, the decision to add this
support has been taken and we're planning to add Solaris x86 to our
supported platforms list in the next release of Adobe Reader which
might happen in 2009."
CommunityOne(http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone/) was held on Monday, May, 5, 2008. As we were told it is quite expensive to park in San Francisco. Dermot and us decided to take the CalTrain(http://www.caltrain.com/) from Palo Alto to SFO. As we didn't know how long it would take to go to the Palo Alto station, we let the clock alarm to wake up at 6:30. After breakfast, we drive to Stanford Shopping Center which is near the station and park our car there. It takes only 5 mins to go to the station. The round trip costs $11.5.
We arrived at SF station around 8:50am. After the registration, we went to the general session which started at 9:30 by Ian Murdock. Jonathan Schwarz also showed up in the meeting and gave a brief talk. You can also see the recorded video of the session online from the CommunityOne page. Our EVP, Rich Green also announced the launch of OpenSolaris 2008.05. Stephan Han demoed the installation part and it is great to see Jedy's timezone selection GUI. Then D-Traced was demoed together with JavaScript in Firefox 3. After that, Michal's IPS GUI was demoed to install a package online. James Hughes demoed the power of ZFS by destroy some hard disks in a running system with a hamer and an electric drill.
Then the technical sessions (http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone/agenda.jsp) started. I went to "Getting Started with OpenSolaris; New Features & Building OpenSolaris Packages" by Stephan Han and David Comay. Next is "Develop, Consolidate, and Manage Virtual Environments Entirely in Open Source". It is about Virtual Box (http://www.virtualbox.org/). It is quite cool and just announced 1.6.0. Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.
I also went to some other sessions about Ajax, OpenSolaris storage, etc. I was not feeling well so went back hotel after the sessions. Alfred joined other people on two parties after the meeting. He was so "high" and stayed late only to catch the last CalTrain over mid-night.
I came to work in ERI in Jun, 14, 2002 and I got my 5 year's gift this week, a Samsonite Luggage Set (http://www.eawardcenter.com/rb/0000449813/7/1_023.htm).
5 years is a long time in my working experience. Too many things changed in the past. For now, I like the flexible working environment in Sun and the team members here. Wish I can get the 10 year's gift, too.
I graduated from CS department, TsingHua University, China (http://www.tsinghua.edu.cn) in 1999 and got a master degree. I got my first job as a software developer in Bell Labs China, Lucent Technologies.
In 2002, I joined Sun China Engineering and Research Institute(http://cn.sun.com/eri/) and worked on desktop softwares since then. I have worked on Mozilla, Evolution, Accesibility and several other open source projects. I was one of the ERI stars in 2006 and now the team lead for my team's projects. My team have delivered Evolution, Gaim, Vino, Real Player and other Multimedia tools, Palm Sync, Battery Applet, libnotify, DevHelp, etc. into Solaris. We are also maintaining the GNOME Accessibility Infrastructure(http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/)in the GNOME community.
Now we are also working on OpenSync, GNOME Power manager, Desktop Search, and several other projects and hope we can integrate them into Solaris soon.