Tuesday Jul 01, 2008

OpenSolaris and NetBeans Student Reviews Contest Winners Announced!!!


The wait is over...

First of all, thanks to all the participants. It was a great contest with plenty of good submissions. In fact, it was so close that the judges awarded more second prize winners than originally announced in the contest. Good for you!

Another interesting contest with great prizes will be announced soon. Stay tuned, and check this blog frequently.

And FINALLY... here goes the list!!!
General Students Category

Grand Prize Winner: Ritwik Ghosal, Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata, India. (review)

Second Prize Winners (alphabetically sorted by last name):
1. Carrie Arnold, Ball State university, USA. (review)
2. Blake Deville, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA. (review)
3. Rohan Dhruva, Sardar Patel Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India. (review)
4. Jay Mahadeokar, SRKNEC College, Nagpur, India. (review)
5. Andreas Nilsson, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. (review)
6. Varun Nischal, JIIT University, Noida, India. (review)
7. Saptarshi Purkayastha, Patkar-Varde College, India. (review)
Ritwik Ghosal
Ritwik Ghosal
Campus Ambassadors Category

Grand Prize Winner: Ashwin Bhat, National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, India. (review)

Second Prize Winners (alphabetically sorted by last name):
1. Souvik Das Gupta, UIET, Punjab University, Chandigarh, India. (review)
2. Jonas Dias, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (review)
3. Ajay Kumar, IIITM, Kerala, India. (review)
4. Agraj Mangal, University of Delhi, India. (review)
5. Silveira Neto, Federal University of Ceará, Brazil. (review)
6. Zhiqi Tao, University of Melbourne, Australia. (review)

 Ashwin Bhat
Ashwin Bhat
The two grand prize winners each get $250 in Visa Debit Cards, and all the second prize winners in both categories each get $100 in Visa Debit Cards.

Look out for email communications from us with regards to the prize shipment.

Congratulations!!!

Posted on: Jul 01, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: Sun

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Wednesday Jun 18, 2008

New to OpenSolaris? Let the students help you...


Souvik Das Gupta, Sun Campus Ambassador at UIET, Punjab University, Chandigarh, India, presented a detailed getting started guide with OpenSolaris 2008.05 and VMware Fusion. He found the new OpenSolaris 2008.05 very simple and easy to use. Check out Souvik's submission here.
 Souvik DasGupta
Souvik DasGupta
Rohan Dhruva
Rohan Dhruva
 Rohan Dhruva from Sardar Patel Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India, had a detailed OpenSolaris review where he covered the download, first boot, desktop, installer, network configurations, desktop effects, package manager, multimedia, drivers and tips of new users. Check out Rohan's review here.

Ritwik Ghosal from Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata, India, had experimented with many aspects of OpenSolaris in his seven part review. In this post, Ritwik summarized his findings vis-a-vis various Linux distributions as well as presented his requests for enhancements.
 Ritwik Ghosal
Ritwik Ghosal

Posted on: Jun 18, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: OpenSolaris

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Couple of more OpenSolaris reviews...


Ajay Kumar, the Sun Campus Ambassador at IIITM, Kerala, India,  gives a lot of tips and tricks for OpenSolaris installation and fixing LAN, WLAN, and sound card issues. He gives OpenSolaris a rating of 4.0 for performance, 3.5 for features, 3.5 for user interface, 5.0 for price and value of money, and a score of 4.0 overall (all ratings are out of 5.0). Ajay's OpenSolaris review is here.
 Ajay Kumar
Ajay Kumar
Shiv Prakash
Shiv Prakash
 Shiv Prakash from Yeshwantrao Chavan College of Engineering, Nagpur, India, has some bold predictions for OpenSolaris. :-) He goes over the download and installation process (including a tip for those with network bandwidth issues), his take on the initial look and feel as well as his suggestions for the areas of work in near future. Check out Shiv Prakash's review here.

Andreas Nilsson from Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, installed OpenSolaris 2008.05 in two different hardware -- one an older desktop with 2.53 GHz Intel Pentium 4 CPU and 512 MB RAM, and  another  newer laptop with 2 GHz Intel Core2 Duo and 3 GB RAM. Andreas is also excited about ZFS, DTrace and seamless integration of 64 and 32 bit applications in OpenSolaris. Check out Andreas' review here.
 Andreas Nilsson
Andreas Nilsson

Posted on: Jun 18, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: OpenSolaris

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Tuesday Jun 17, 2008

More OpenSolars goodies...


Zhiqi Tao, Sun Campus Ambassador at University of Melbourne, Australia, has run OpenSolaris on his ThinkPad T61 for a month, and he has shared his experiences -- both good and bad -- in his OpenSolaris review. His screen-by-screen commentary of booting into LiveCD mode, installation, post installation configurations etc. will be very handy for the first time users. Check out his little tidbits (like you gotta remember to eject the LiveCD from CDROM, there is no reminder!), what worked and what didn't out of the box, his suggestions and much more here.
 Zhiqi Tao
Zhiqi Tao
Jay Mahadeokar
Jay Mahadeokar
 Jay Mahadeokar from SRKNEC College, Nagpur, India, had a series of OpenSolaris posts that covered a lot of grounds ranging from OpenSolaris 2008.05 Live CD overview, how to run OpenSolaris in other operating system environments using VirtualBox, DTrace exploration, solution to a compiz hang problem, a screencast of OpenSolaris installation in a virtual drive to a comparison of OpenSolaris 2008.05 and Ubuntu 8.04. Check out Jay's OpenSolaris submissions here.

Jay also had a nice series of NetBeans reviews and tutorials. Check those out here. (Some of these NetBeans posts were submitted to an earlier contest, and those are not being considered for this contest.)

Angad Singh, Sun Campus Ambassador at JIIT University, Noida, India, submitted several tips and tricks on OpenSolaris. Here Angad describes multibooting OpenSolaris 2008.05 with SxDE, here are the tips on OpenSolaris "Reboot button," and here are some network administration scripts. His observations about lack of failsafe mode in OpenSolaris are here, and finally, here are some thoughts on OpenSolaris (at a Sun Corona Day event presentation).
 Angad Singh
Angad Singh

Posted on: Jun 17, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: OpenSolaris

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Monday Jun 16, 2008

4 more OpenSolaris reviews from the contest


Kurchi Subhra Hazra, Sun Campus Ambassador at National Institute of Technology, Durgapur, India, likes what she sees in the "new kid of the block." She elegantly describes live CD, what is does and what happened when she tried out OpenSolaris 2008.05 live CD. Kurchi explains the advantages she sees in OpenSolaris and its evolving community. Check out her review here.
 Kurchi Subhra Hazra
Kurchi Subhra Hazra
Blake Deville
Blake Deville
Blake Deville from University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA, described his OpenSolaris 2008.05 experiences from the lens of an administrator familiar with Linux. He briefly glanced over the history, and compared his installation and set-up steps against what he has experienced in other Linux distributions. Blake's review is here.
In his review, Avinash Joshi from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri Campus, India, focused on the new features of OpenSolaris 2008.05, requested a feature for enhancement and went over the details of how the new OpenSolaris OS benefits him as a student. Check out his review here. (Scroll down to see the review if you happen to get formatting issues in your favorite browser at the top section of his site.)
 Avinash Joshi
Avinash Joshi
Silveira Neto
Silveira Neto
Jose Maria Silveira Neto, Sun Campus Ambassador at Federal University of Ceará, Brazil, focused on ZFS file system feature of OpenSolaris 2008.05 OS. In his review, Silveira experimented with corrputing the data in a mirrored zpool (RAID-1) and demonstrated how the self-healing characteristic of ZFS keeps the data intact. He concluded this review with the steps administrators should take on the defective disk. In a second review, Silveira showed the tricks of turning on colors in an OpenSolaris terminal.

Posted on: Jun 16, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: OpenSolaris

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Friday Jun 13, 2008

3 more OpenSolaris reviews from the contest


Carrie Arnold from Ball State University, USA, had a nice experience installing OpenSolaris using VirtualBox on her Intel iMac. Check here to see the details of how she set it up to be ready for her development platform. The speed with which she managed to set up OpenSolaris with powerful development tools has convinced her to work with this systeem regularly in her coursework.

In a second submission, Carrie shared her experiences setting up SDL on OpenSolaris for her game development work.
 Carrie Arnold -- Ball State University
Carrie Arnold
Pedro Reis -- Universidade Estácio de sá
Pedro Reis
Sun Campus Ambassador Pedro Reis from Universidade Estácio de sá, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, have already installed OpenSolaris 2008.05 in 12 notebooks, 2 macboooks and 18 PCs! So sure he has a lot to say about his OpenSolaris experiences in his review. Interesting to see his range of experiences about drivers. And he has some good tips for newbies. Check out Pedro's review here.

Jaynil Gandhi from Sardar Vallabhbhai Vidhyalaya, India, had an entry that focused on various features of OpenSolaris 2008.05 as well as benefits of the LiveCD option. He touched upon the new packaging system IPS, ZFS and DTrace. Jaynil's post is here.

 Jaynil Gandhi
Jaynil Gandhi

Posted on: Jun 13, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: OpenSolaris

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Tuesday Jun 10, 2008

Reviews from contest...


As mentioned yesterday, we would be making the submitted reviews available over the next two weeks. We would publish one or two reviews within a single post so that all students can get their share of limelight. And the best ones will additionally be featured in Sun's student reviews site. All these are in addition to the prizes. :-) So keep checking this site regularly.
Today we are featuring Zhen Tao. He is studying in Peking University, and he is a Sun Campus Ambassador as well. Zhen wrote a review of OpenSolaris. While this is well-written, the contest entries needed to be in English. So this review is ineligible for the prizes, but we want to thank Zhen for his efforts.
 Zhen Tao
Zhen Tao
Peking University
On that note, we received some entries that were in languages other than English. The rules were clear about the language requirement, and on each instance we informed the submitter about their language mistake as soon as the submission came in. We asked those students to resubmit in English, which some of them did. Going forward, we will try our best to expand the list of languages in which the reviews can be written.

The submissions of the following students are ineligible because of language, invalid URL, ineligible product or similar issues:

Paulo Cesar
Ding Liang
Szakacs Marius
Ernesto Leon Mejia Isaza
Thao Uyen Nguyen Dang
Virlan Petru
Anirudh Sharma
Zhen Tao
Linh Trinh Viet
Franklin Zura

Students in the above list, please feel free to contact us if you feel we made a mistake.

Posted on: Jun 10, 2008

Posted by: chhandomay

Category: OpenSolaris

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