Musings of an OpenSolaris Technical Writing Intern Mark Settle's Mighty Pen

Alas! My internship concludes tomorrow. And on Saturday, I graduate from Colorado State University. At the risk of being overly sentimental, I thought I'd share a few thoughts for the world wide web.

First, I ought to thank everyone for their help and friendship over the last four months. Diane, thanks for trusting me from the outset and always pointing me to the right people. Clay and Owen, thanks for indulging my nerdy alter-ego. Sarah, thanks for your good company. Ginnie, thanks for always finding the time to answer my questions. Plenty of other folks also deserve mention, but writing an exhaustive list would be, well, exhausting. Just know that it's been an absolute pleasure to work with such a fine group of people.

For those of you who have been with Sun for a long time, it's probably easy to lose sight of just how remarkable this company's culture is. The people here possess remarkable goodwill, talent and passion. These are self-reinforcing things, and make it easy to enjoy a day at work.

I don't know where I'll be next year, or even next month. But wherever I go, I'll take the Sun culture with me.

Ubuntu Linux is the most popular “Linux OS” out there, according to at least one unscientific measurement. (Curiously, Solaris makes the 'Linux cut,' placing 54th). In fact, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes argues that Ubuntu is becoming the generic Linux distro. And now, according to Information Week's Serdar Yegulalp, Sun and Ubuntu are cozying up:

Sun's getting ready to provide support for the server flavor of Ubuntu on their small-to-mid-sized server hardware, in conjunction with Canonical. Their existing Linux lineups include Red Hat Enterprise and SUSE, two well-established server players, with Ubuntu Server as the newest addition.

Ubuntu 8.04 is being released in three weeks, and so I checked out the Beta page to find out what's new. Near the bottom of the page, I found details on a new installation interface:

There is a new installation option for Windows users. Wubi allows users to install and uninstall Ubuntu like any other Windows application. It does not require a dedicated partition, nor does it affect the existing bootloader, yet users can experience a dual-boot setup almost identical to a full installation. Wubi works with a physical CD or in stand-alone mode, by downloading an appropriate ISO to install from. It can be found on the root of the CD as Wubi.exe. A full installation within a dedicated partition is still recommended, but Wubi is a great way to try Ubuntu for a few days and weeks before committing dedicated disk resources.

My first thought was that improvements to the Ubuntu installation interface merit top-of-page placement, but then again, I'm partial to that kind of thing. My second thought was that being able to install Ubuntu as a standalone program is pretty rad. All of you developers out there, is this doable for OpenSolaris?

I just joined Sun's Facebook network. For those of you who are not part of Facebook, I thought I'd pass along some notes from the social networking underground.

• As of this writing, there are 5,687 members.
• Someone in the Czech Republic is selling a 14-inch television.
• Hugo, Cat of 1000 Faces, Episode 3, Star Wars, is the most recently posted item.
• Sun employees on Facebook list their most popular bands as The Killers, Led Zeppelin, and Depeche Mode.

There's also (believe it or not!) plenty of material that is relevant to Sun. Event invitations have been posted and blogs promoted. A slate of Sun-specific groups are available, including one for IPG. I am its tenth, proud member.

My current charge is to explain how to dual-boot OpenSolaris with a second operating system. Leave it to me to accidentally delete my section on Backups, and not have another copy.

There are myriad types and topics of OpenSolaris documentation. This approach is predicated on the idea that if Sun gives users and developers the power to help steer the documentation ship, we’ll have a better idea of where to go. This makes sense, but it works only if users know where to find a given piece of information.

The OpenSolaris Documentation page is the starting point for many users, and its awfully confusing. Having visited it many times over the last month, I think we can do a better job of helping people drill down to the information they need.

1. The page's layout suggests no obvious path for one’s eye.
2. Visual cues like headlines are too sparse.
3. Some lists are divided by subject, others by audience, and others still by pedagogical tool.

I plan to put some time into thinking about how the site can be adjusted for usability, and will post again once I get the chance to organize my ideas.

UPDATE: it's unfashionable to write about usability without mentioning Steve Jobs. So there you have it. Steve Jobs.

OpenSolaris has one of Sun Microsystem’s most developed user communities. This was evident last night at the monthly Front Range OpenSolaris User’s Group, which drew a few dozen people in Broomfield, Colorado, and many more on the event’s live stream. Video was taken of the event, and should be up soon.

Microsoft has a long way to go until it can wear the interoperability mantle. To wit, its DreamSpark blog features a video post entitled “Imagine Cup and the Interoperability Challenge. There are now more reasons to compete.” But watching the video requires installing Microsoft Silverlight, its proprietary Flash competitor.

Last week, Google and SlashDot were abuzz about a new program from Microsoft, called DreamSpark. It allows students from eleven countries, including the United States, to download some of Microsoft's core proprietary developer tools. They range from Microsoft Expression Studio, the company's upstart Dreamweaver competitor, to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition.

In Microsoft's own words,

DreamSpark is simple, it's all about giving students Microsoft professional-level developer and design tools at no charge so you can chase your dreams and create the next big breakthrough in technology - or just get a head start on your career.

Sun, of course, has been at the leading edge of this free software thing. And then some. Its commitment to open source software is motivated by the recognition that companies that are able to harness communities to drive development will set the next generation of technology standards.

Microsoft hasn't yet made the leap, but is clearly feeling pressure from the OSS community to put its products in the hands of tomorrow's thought leaders. Now if only textbooks were free.

Search engines tend to do an exceptionally good job of finding technical information. According to Clay, who sits a couple of sliding glass doors away, this is not a coincidence. He sees it as a product of the fact that Google's algorithms are developed by technically-minded people. Engineers might be expected to optimize – either consciously or not – their work for projects that mesh with their own interests. Thus Google's ostensibly deft handling of technical queries.

Clay's observation is a fresh reminder to focus on the customer experience. I hope to lend SMI a pair of fresh eyes, helping us give things a second or third look, as needed.

Finally, my last observation about the Get It page:

The site does a good job of describing how to use the commands in Solaris to burn a CD, but many people don't have a Solaris-attached CD burner on hand. I went on the prowl for some Vista-based freeware, but could only find shareware. Some of these utilities won't handle files larger than 300MB, while others don't work after a seven day trial period. Here's the rundown:

• DropToCD
• Magic ISO
• Nero
• PowerISO

Further complicating things, the different ISO programs use slightly different lingo to describe the same processes. Phrases like mapping, writing, imaging and burning seem to be used interchangeably at times, but not at others. I imagine that most users don't have an issue with this step. If possible, we should highlight a preferred utility for burning a LiveCD in XP/Vista/Leopard/Linux and provide further instruction.

Again from the Get It page, comment three:

For users who want to install OpenSolaris in as few steps as possible, the instructions are a bit confusing. If you jump past the “Download the Live CD” and “Try out the LiveCD” headlines, here's what you see:

Install OpenSolaris Developer Preview

Should you like your experience with the OpenSolaris Developer Preview, you may like to install it to your system. You can execute the OpenSolaris installer by clicking on the Install OpenSolaris icon on your desktop. For detailed installation instructions, see OpenSolaris Installation Documentation.

I'd assumed that installation files and Live CD files would be available in separate downloads. It wasn't, so I read the installation section a few times before figuring out that I had to back up and create a Live CD. Perhaps the paragraph could instead read:

Install OpenSolaris Developer Preview

Start by downloading the OpenSolaris Developer Preview Live CD, which contains all necessary installation files. Boot your computer from the Live CD and tinker around a bit. Like what you see? Begin installing OpenSolaris by double-clicking on the Install OpenSolaris icon on your desktop. For more detailed instructions, see OpenSolaris
Installation Documentation.

Here's item number two, from the Get It page:

The BitTorrent download link pulls up gobbledygook in Vista/IE7. But it works in both Firefox and Opera.

I found installing Indiana to be a very straightforward process. In fact, it was much easier than I'd expected it to be. Here is the first of a few observations worth passing on:

The System Requirements page needs a bit more explanation, and the Disk Space row is probably the best example of this.

System Requirements

Disk Space: Recommended size is at least 10 GB.

Is 10GB the minimum amount of space that one needs to comfortably run the Slim Install, or the eventual full package? Is this the amount of space that the OS will physically occupy, or the amount of space it will need to run with some level of ease, accounting for caches and so forth? Let's clarify this a bit further.

Last week, I discussed how SMI makes a good deal of educational resources available to its employees at learning.sun.com. There's some really exceptional material out there, if you can just find the time.

But I'd give up a day's paycheck for a simple cheat sheet listing the most common UNIX commands.

Or not. I've taken to keeping a notebook of new commands, so this actually isn't too big of a deal. This post is my reminder to find someone from Sun Learning Services, and provide feedback.

A laptop is sitting on my desk, and it's all business.

I'm charged with loading OpenSolaris: Indiana Developer Preview 2 onto the computer's hard drive. I'm following our existing documentation, and if necessary, a pair of dice. Let's dive in!