To sort out the various Solaris flavors, watch a quick 10-minute webcast that introduces you to the differences between the Solaris 10 OS, SXDE, OpenSolaris and Indiana.

The webcast can be viewed here.

Participate in the Open Source Community Innovation Awards Programs!

Open Source Communities Announce Participation Details For Sun Sponsored $1Million Innovation Awards Program

Community Innovation Awards Program web site

Each of the following six open source communities is giving away $175,000 (USD). Each community has specified its own contest with its own rules. Prize winners will be announced in August 2008 and payments made by the end of September 2008.

The OpenSolaris community also will be announcing a student research grant program.

• GlassFish

• NetBeans

• OpenJDK

• OpenOffice.org

• OpenSolaris

• OpenSPARC

Solaris Application Programming, by Sun engineer Darryl Gove, has just been published by Sun Press/Prentice Hall.

Here's the back-of-the-jacket blurb:

Solaris™ Application Programming is a comprehensive guide to optimizing the performance of applications running in your Solaris environment. From the fundamentals of system performance to using analysis and optimization tools to their fullest, this wide-ranging resource shows developers and software architects how to get the most from Solaris systems and applications.

Whether you’re new to performance analysis and optimization or an experienced developer searching for the most efficient ways to solve performance issues, this practical guide gives you the background information, tips, and techniques for developing, optimizing, and debugging applications on Solaris.

The text begins with a detailed overview of the components that affect system performance. This is followed by explanations of the many developer tools included with Solaris OS and the Sun Studio compiler, and then it takes you beyond the basics with practical, real-world examples. In addition, you will learn how to use the rich set of developer tools to identify performance problems, accurately interpret output from the tools, and choose the smartest, most efficient approach to correcting specific problems and achieving maximum system performance.

Coverage includes

• A discussion of the chip multithreading (CMT) processors from Sun and how they change the way that developers need to think about performance
• A detailed introduction to the performance analysis and optimization tools included with the Solaris OS and Sun Studio compiler
• Practical examples for using the developer tools to their fullest, including informational tools, compilers, floating point optimizations, libraries and linking, performance profilers, and debuggers
• Guidelines for interpreting tool analysis output
• Optimization, including hardware performance counter metrics and source code optimizations
• Techniques for improving application performance using multiple processes, or multiple threads

• An overview of hardware and software components that affect system performance, including coverage of SPARC and x64 processors

   

  You can get it at Powells Books online (my favorite online bookstore).
  
  
   

Here we are playing with live streaming video at the December meeting of the Silicon Valley Open Solaris User Group: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/svosug/

• 8:10pm - OpenSolaris Community Innovation Awards announcement and call to get involved

• 8:20pm - James Liu describes his forthcoming paper on writing device drivers, initially coauthored with Seth Goldberg. This will be the first of a series of three articles that will be an entry point where the Writing Device Drivers book is a mammoth resource.

• 8:31pm - James talks about Intel NIC drivers going into OpenSolaris.

• 8:42pm - Alan DuBoff talks about Masayuki Murayama's sfe driver and other NIC drivers (Free NIC drivers for Solaris) and also recommends Garrett D'Amore's afe driver as a great example driver.

Tune in next month for more exciting content!:)

Sun is sponsoring several contests, and prize money is designated for the Solaris/OpenSolaris OS in the areas of device drivers, applications, documentation, and undergraduate research.

Join the contest planning here:
OpenSolaris Community Innovation Awards
Awards program email archives

What drivers, applications, and documentation does the Solaris OS need? What research should be done? How much prize money should be awarded for different types of projects? How should entries be judged? By whom?

Contest announcement

Community Innovation Awards Program web site

NetBeans IDE 6.0 is now available for download at http://download.netbeans.org/netbeans/6.0/final/. Select the C/C++ bundle, which includes the base IDE and C/C++ support. Installation on Solaris, Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X is quick and simple.

You can create projects now using NetBeans IDE 6.0, and work with these projects in the next release of the Sun Studio IDE.

New features added to the C/C++ support in this release of NetBeans IDE 6.0 will be available in the Sun Studio IDE in SXDE 1/08 and Sun Studio Express 1/08, which will be released in January/February. These features include:

- Improvements in the Classes window, which lets you see all the classes in your project and their members and fields.

- New Include hierarchy, which lets you inspect the hierarchy of source and header files in your project

- New Type hierarchy, which lets you inspect all types and subtypes of a class

- Code completion for #include directives 

Sun has launched a "multi-year program called the Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program." OpenSolaris is one of six Sun open source projects that is included in this new award program. View the announcement.

Details will be available in January 2008. Stay tuned.

In the mean time, learn more about OpenSolaris and how you can contribute.

We keep trying to find ways to make the product documentation for Solaris and the Sun Studio tools easier to find and browse.

One way we've found is by creating "Information Centers" containing links to all the relevant documentation.

The Information Center for the Solaris OS can be found at
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hubs/documentation/

We have also just created an information center for all the documentation around the Sun Studio compilers and tools. It's on docs.sun.com at
http://docs.sun.com/source/820-3845/stdinfoctr.html

The Sun Studio Information Center also contains a link to pages for all the compiler options, organized by compiler and task. Because not all similar options are spelled exactly alike in C, C++, and Fortran, this list of comparisons can be very handy.

You can find the compiler options page at:
http://docs.sun.com/source/820-3529/index.html

Let us know if you find these pages useful.

Join the Sun High Performance computing community, http://hpc.sun.com. We're putting this dedicated HPC web resource together for all Sun customers, partners and Sun employees. Its not like a traditional web portal;  post your own content, leave comments on existing content, or add new content to existing pages.

We're adding new content daily. Use it as a aggregation point for all information relating to high performance computing. And we're open to new ideas about what we should dish out on the site.

There's now a quick-start tutorial guide for using the new Sun Studio 12 IDE. It's here.

SDN Share is a new pilot program (http://sdnshare.com) that enables the developer community to submit content to the Sun Developer Network websites. 

Anyone can submit tips, code, examples, even articles of some length, to the site. Submissions are moderated and reviewed, but the turnaround time seems to be measured in hours currently (except on weekends). And, viewers can vote up or down on submissions.

There are categories for Solaris that include debugging, driver development, installation, Java on Solaris, migration, networking, predictive self healing (SMF), resource management (ZFS, Zones, Containers), and security.  And there's a developer tools/sunstudio category as well.

SDN Share has just started up and the content is started to flow in. There's also an RSS feed at http://sdnshare.com/index_rss.jsp and individual feeds for individual categories.

Got some great tip on using Solaris or Sun Studio? Put it on SDN Share.