SE Thought

Tuesday October 23, 2007

Ian Murdock to share at National University Singapore The Singapore User Groups is certainly excited to have Ian in Singapore, even it's only for less than a day.

One of his appointment to share with NUS students. We email 4000 computer science students, so hopefully a good number turned up.

Instead of talking Indiana, we decided to choose a topic that is more appropriate to the audience (most of them probably don't even know Solaris well).

Here is the content of the email invitation:

You are cordially invited to join Ian Murdock as he shares with us his journey from pursuing a Computer Science Degree in Purdue University, founding of the Debian project, and his becoming one of the most prominent and respected member of the open source community.
Ian will also share with us his insights into what lies ahead for Linux and OpenSolaris.

I think it's a great topic, and I hope it will appeal to the students (under-grad and post-grad).  

More details can be found at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=19685797200 

Sun Marketing has been a great help. Our partner Zara Technology will also be helping tomorrow. 

Monday October 30, 2006

Will Solaris run on my hardware? I found this simple tool that helps me test the compatibility of Solaris on Dell Inspiron 8500. It's quite interesting to see that the tool even tell which Solaris 10 (e.g. Update 2) is required!

I documented my experience (and an error I encountered, which was promptly addressed by our China team) at http://www.singanix.org/bb/viewtopic.php?p=96#96

============ copy from the tool home page ================
Sun Device Detection Tool can tell you in just a couple of minutes whether the Solaris OS supports the devices that are detected in your x86 system.
Sun Device Detection Tool produces a table that shows whether a Solaris driver is available for each device the tool detects. The table tells you whether the driver is built in to the Solaris OS or whether a third-party driver is available.
Source: http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/hcts/device_detect.html
(2006-10-30 06:36:52.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Saturday August 19, 2006

Singanix A group of us have made a baby step to develop Singanix.

Below was a summary of the email that kinda summarised our first meeting 1+ month ago...

It's called Singanix as the idea was born in Singapore Solaris User Group. But it's of course open to all. After all, it's one global village indeed.

So do drop by at www.singanix.org. Most importantly, join us at http://www.singanix.org/bb/profile.php?mode=register

==========
Singanix is a lean but cool OS. It differs to Solaris or OpenSolaris in the following manner:
1. It has 1 CD, not 5.
2. It's for end users, not servers. It targets Sun Ray, notebooks, desktops. It has drivers, utilities, etc for end users.
3. It still has items that makes Solaris cool: zones, zfs, dtrace, smf...
4. It's based on lightweight UI (e.g. xfce), not gnome. My apology if I hurt some gnome/jds folks (my personal preference is enlightenment).
5. It's cool looking. People would ask "what OS is this?"
6. Instead of building on top of the kernel, we would dive inside and make it slim. This differentiates it from other OpenSolaris distros.
7. It has up to date softwares. For example, Firefox 1.5 instead of Mozilla 1.7

Objectives:
1. learn.
2. have fun.
3. make friends with like-minded people.
4. achieve something we all can be proud of.

Explaination on the objectives:
+ we would learn by diving into the kernel. Since the kernel is the OS, let's get to the bottom of it.
+ we would have fun making our OS cool, lean and sexy. I wanna have Miss World 2006 theme please...
+ a common project would encourage greater interaction, instead of 1-way interaction we've had so far... Each of us is interested in OpenSolaris, so might as well make friends and do something together. Folks, we are all adult here, so in this community, it's everyone's responsibility to think how to take our community to the next level.


(2006-08-19 07:09:23.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Sunday June 18, 2006

OpenSolaris and pre-sales As some of you know, I'm a pre-sales in Sun Singapore. To my customers, I represent Sun, and certainly I got my fair shares of Solaris questions. I've lost count how many times I've presented and discussed Solaris with customers. OpenSolaris, or specifically, the opening of Solaris to anyone out there and the building of the community, have helped me in many ways.

Here are just some:
1. More technical materials are available, be it from forum or blog. Instead of searching onestop and the various intranet sites, now I just go to blogs.sun.com and opensolaris.org. And of course, now I can do Google.

2. More updated materials are available. Before, we only have internal mailing list. Now blogs and opensolaris complement this.

3. More roadmap info is available. This is important for pre-sales, as customers like to know the future so they can plan properly. Nobody likes negative surprise in enterprise architecture.

4. More avenues to ask questions. Before, all we had was internal mailing list.

5. Direct access of information by customers. I've been encouraging my customers to subscribe direct (RSS) to the key engineers blogs, participate in the forum and be part of the community.

6. More documentation on source code. So far, taking parts of source codes to explain the 'under the hood' stuff has been appreciated by customers. The source code is as good as it gets.

7. More information about who actually write which parts of Solaris. With Solaris engineers blogging their work, we know exactly what they are working on. So we know with certainty who knows which part of Solaris very well. Before, they were just names-in-the-mailing-list to me.


The opening of the source code also helps me to push Solaris to customers who value openness and transparency. It also helps as assurance to customers that they have choice beyond Sun hardware. In fact, one major customer has run Solaris on HP servers and very happy with it. We are now talking to them on support contract. 2 years ago, I didn't even dream on this stuff.

The cycle continues. The more these customers learn and appreciate Solaris, the more they use it. Some have begun the process of making it the standard OS. The more they use it, the more information they want, the better they know Solaris, and eventually they would participate and contribute information. And I see that win-win.

With that, Happy Birthday OpenSolaris! Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris (2006-06-17 09:52:47.0) Permalink Comments [2]