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Have four minutes? Then check out Sun news this week by listening to the short podcast below. In this edition, Chhandomay Mandal and Maijaliisa Burkert discuss Sun's top spot in tape storage automation revenue for the first half of 2009, as well as an eWeek article discussing Sun's Solaris Operating System's optimization for Intel Nehalem processors.
| 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
|
| 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 |
| 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!!! |
| 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
|
 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
|
| 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
|
 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
|
| Ashwin Bhat,
Sun Campus Ambassador at National
Institute of
Technology, Karnataka, India, has a step by step
set-up guide for OpenSolaris users who are primarily focused on
laptop/desktop usage. He not only has lots of details and screenshots
but also the features he liked most and the ones he would like to see
added in future OpenSolaris releases. Check out Ashwin's review here.
In a second review, Ashwin discussed the new features in NetBeans 6.1 and what he liked. |
Ashwin Bhat
|
 Jonas Dias
|
Jonas Dias,
Sun Campus Ambassador at Federal
University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, put a full SAMP
platform to work on OpenSolaris, and integrated the stack with
Service Management Facility (SMF) to be self healing. Check out his
step by step tutorial here,
and do not miss the conversation in the comments section. In another submission, Jonas has put together a nice tutorial on writing a Web Service using NetBeans 6.1 and using it in projects. |
| 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
|
 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
|
|
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
|
 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
|
 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. |
| 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
|
 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
|
| 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
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. |
| The OpenSolaris 2008.5 and NetBeans 6.1
product reviews contest
has come to an end. We are very happy with your response and enthusiasm!!! 48 students from 14 different countries -- Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Moldova, Pakistan, Romania, Sri Lanka, Sweden, USA and Vietnam -- have submitted 78 technical reviews during the contest period. |
 |
| Out of the 78 reviews,
OpenSolaris and NetBeans reviews were pretty
evenly matched. There were 40 OpenSolaris reviews and 38 NetBeans
reviews. The document here lists the participants and their university affiliations. If you submitted an entry, your name should be there. If it isn't, please contact us and we will investigate. (But we are pretty sure we got everybody...) Now the judges are getting very busy evaluating your submissions. The results will be out on June 25th. GOOD LUCK!!! In the mean time, we would be publishing the submitted reviews in this blog... |
| This
morning we are announcing OpenSolaris
OS and NetBeans
IDE 6.1. We're
pretty excited about these products, but we want to know what you --
the
student developers -- think. So we have arranged for a student contest with cool prizes! Review OpenSolaris OS and/or NetBeans IDE 6.1 for...
|
 |
| Simply: 1. Download OpenSolaris OS and/or NetBeans IDE 6.1. 2. Test the product and post a review! 3. Submit the URL of your review. 4. Do it before June 6, 2008. The student reviews program site has all the details, so does the contest page. And here is a nice flier for you to pass around. Hang them on your bulletin boards, email it to your friends, the more the merrier... We will be posting all the submissions in this site, so continue to check it out. Good luck and have fun! |
This blog copyright 2009 by chhandomay
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