Robs' Blog: incoherencies from an american ex-pat in exotic beijing,
  or: how i learned to stop worrying and love bureaucracy

At last Thursday's Beijing OpenSolaris User Group meeting, we had three different perspectives on OpenSolaris.

Jim Hughes

Our first presentation was a special guest appearance by the always effervescent Jim Hughes, Sun Fellow and Solaris Chief Technology Officer. Jim outlined four features of OpenSolaris that make it such a compelling operating environment:

• Familiarity (to those used a Linux look and feel)
• ZFS Root
• New patching mechanism
• New packaging mechanism

And, gave some excellent background on each of them. Here is a picture of Jim making a point about the OpenSolaris CD, and showing how to make a point without a pointer.

Aubrey Li

Aubrey Li, a Senior Software Engineer at the Open Source Technology Center of Intel in Shanghai then spoke about an OpenSolaris Developer's Start-up Guide which he wrote. Audrey also answered a lot of questions from folks in attendance.

Sun ZhongYuan

Lastly, Sun ZhongYuan, a member of the HCTS team at Sun, spoke about using OpenSolaris productively with such tools as VirtualBox and Wine.

Special credit goes to Simon Sun, who organized and hosted this month's meeting.

More pictures of the event can be found here.