Student Views and Reviews: Sun on Campus

I am always on the lookout for tutorials written by members of the OSUM community to re-publish here to hopefully help and serve a wide audience.  So, I was pleased to find a new and informative one in the OSUM blogs forum written by Masafumi Ohta, an active member of the OSUM community from Japan.

Masafumi recently purchased a new Eee named 'N10J' with a Nvidia G105M.  He said while it works well on OpenSolaris, the operating system did not recognize the driver as Nvidia because it wasn't supported. Masafumi ultimately found the driver on the Nvidia Web page under drivers for Ubuntu, and described how to install it in his N10J with OpenSolaris build 126 in this tutorial. 

The tutorial is great as Masafumi walks through all of the issues he ran into, and linked to his information sources. Now that the driver is up and running Masafumi is able to use it for games such as Second Life, but said unfortunately, most of the keyboard shortcuts are not working -- something he is hoping will be fixed quickly!  

So, if you have a similar issue with an Nvidia driver in a new system running OpenSolaris this may be a great tutorial for you to bookmark and keep handy.  Thanks for sharing Masafumi!

If anyone else has a tutorial for a Sun product post the link in the comments below or send it to me at maijaliisa.burkert(at)sun.com! 

Another week, another news wrapup podcast for you to catch up on what happened at Sun this week. Topics include new updates to Sun's Java Store Beta, Sun's new alliance with PayPal, Sun solutions in use at Columbia University and the University of Zurich, and Sun's top honor in the American Society of Training and Development's BEST Awards competition. (Brought to you by hosts Chhandomay Mandal and Maijaliisa Burkert.)

Catch up on Sun in the news this week in the short segment below as Chhandomay Mandal and Maijaliisa Burkert review Amazon's new cloud storage offering based on MySQL open-source software, the 100 million download milestone OpenOffice.org hit this week, the announced availability of Sun investor proxy materials, and the new 3.0.10 maintenance release of VirtualBox.

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.

Listen to the short segment below to catch up on Sun's product announcements this week including the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array, new SPARC 64 VII processors, the GlassFish Communications Server 2.0, and the new Sun Storage 6180 Array.  

Student Views and Reviews recently conducted an e-mail interview with Abhishek Munie, a “long-time” user of the JavaFX programming language. Abhishek has been working with JavaFX since the 1.0 release in December 2008. Abhishek reported that he utilized the learning resources and samples available on JavaFX.com to learn the program. He made regular, steady progress in learning the language and was able to develop and submit a complete application for the JavaFX Coding Challenge which he said “was a great experience.”

While Abhishek said he is still exploring the new features in JavaFX 1.2, he reported that his favorite new tools are the javafx.scene.chart and javafx.scene.control. He also said “screen and javafx.util.math class has made my work easy, but I expected more features to be available in class javafx.stage.” When asked what he would like to add to JavaFX right now Abhishek said, “I would like to improve the way a JavaFX application is deployed and run, and make it faster.”

Abhishek said what he likes most about JavaFX is that “it gives the power of Java with easy-to-create good-looking and user-friendly applications.” He pointed out that features such as the timeline and effects give a developer the ability “to easily combine many things within a custom node, which makes it easy to develop a good looking and powerful application, within no time.”

Looking to the future, Abhishek says “the future of programming language is JavaFX, but it has a long way to go.” He acknowledges that the world has already “seen the power of Java-powered mobile apps” and said that he believes “there is no doubt that JavaFX will bring a revolution,” largely because of its ability to easily be deployed on a variety of devices.

Read more of Abhishek's interview here.

Catch up on Sun news this week including Sun's role in the upcoming Oracle OpenWorld, the release of Solaris 10 10/09, and the newly released versions of Sun Role Manager 5.0 software and Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7.0.

In my day-to-day work at Sun, I track product reviews for OpenOffice, JavaFX, VirtualBox, NetBeans, and OpenSolaris. I am used to hunting down product reviews and how-to tutorials on the Internet on a regular basis. So, I was more than pleased to come across a great OpenSolaris how-to article today in OSUM, written by Andrew Browne, a student from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

In Andrew's blog post, he described how he set up a zone on his OpenSolaris box to host a webstack made up of Apache 2, MySQL, and PHP. It's obvious Andrew did his homework, because he cited a few locations for additional info. – a most appreciated tactic in these types of tutorials!

He even warned that the tricky part was in starting the servers, but gave a fair bit of guidance for getting through the main issues he faced.  Overall, Andrew concluded by saying: "Zones are cool.  They have the security and separation of VM's without all the overhead of another OS."

Many thanks to Andrew for taking the time to share his experiences and help others learn! Please check out Andrew's great blog post here in OSUM. And I am on the hunt for more how-to tutorials or reviews like this from students for an upcoming revamp of the Sun Student Reviews site, so please keep them coming!

Busy with homework? Getting ready for midterms? Multitask and catch up on all the Sun news this week in the short segment below as Chhandomay Mandal and Maijaliisa Burkert give a wrap-up of the new release of Sun Ops Center 2.5, discuss the updates to Sun Java Communications Suite 7, and talk about the new Sun hybrid supercomputer in South Africa.

Listen to the short segment below as Chhandomay Mandal and Maijaliisa Burkert give a quick rundown of Sun news this week including the Sun and Oracle Exadata Database Machine Version 2 announcement, upcoming Software Freedom Day events this Saturday, September 19, and highlights of Sun's 2009 Corporate Social Responsibility Report.

I know there are literally hundreds of OSUM leaders out there who have been working hard the past few weeks to get ready for Software Freedom Day 2009, this Saturday, September 19.

Thanks to the hard-working OSUM folks, Sun's network connected more than 25,000 students for local SFD events in 30 countries!  The SFD events have been designed to highlight the importance and benefits of open source technologies.  At each event, students will have the opportunity to hear from open source experts from local universities, and participate in installation demonstrations, all while networking with other students, professors, and developers who are passionate about free and open source technologies. 

If you haven't found an event, check this map to find out whether or not there is SFD party being held in your area! Also, check out the OSUM Software Freedom Day 2009 group or SoftwareFreedomDay.org for more information.

And OSUM leaders, don't be shy about sharing your success stories after the event!  I am most looking forward to seeing pictures of the hundreds of install fests that take place during SFD. 

Happy Software Freedom Day!

Have you seen the newly redesigned Sun Academic Initiative (SAI) Web site? The new SAI site was recently unveiled and features a new tab format, additional content in the Certification tab, new PDF links to Certification Paths, Certification Guides, and posters, separated Educator and Student tabs that include 'Member' sections, and a new Get Started tab with a simple 5-step process to sign up and get going.

For those who haven't heard of it before, the SAI offers non-profit educational institutions and students around the world access to free Web-based professional-grade online courses in addition to discounted certifications for the latest Java and Solaris technologies.

SAI program members receive free access to Sun's extensive portfolio of Web-based courses and ePractice Certification Exams through the SAI Learning Connection as well as an 85% discount off the commercial price on certain Sun Certification Exams!

So, what is so great about that? According to a Certification Magazine Salary survey, Sun Certification can increase your earning power and give you a distinct competitive edge. The survey showed that:

• Sun Certified Programmers earn on average 8.3% more than the average programmer.

• Sun Certified Developers earn on average 14.3% more than the average developer.

• Sun Certified System Administrators earn on average 31% more than system administrators certified on other operating systems.

So check out the new SAI Web site for yourself and get certified!

Do you learn by watching?  I know certainly do!  Seeing technology demonstrated first hand is the best way for me to understand it in depth, and learn how to use it quickly. 

Zembly just announced a series of screencasts are now available on the wiki that were designed to help developers better understand zembly in depth!  What is zembly a few of you might ask?  In short, this is how it works -- you've got an idea for an app so you go to zembly where you create and customize your app (they even have templates).  Then you publish your app on any of a variety of different platforms to include Facebook, iPhone, Meebo, and Google Gadgets -- among others.  The best part is you don't have to worry about hosting, and zembly apps elastically scale on Sun's cloud infrastructure so you don't have to create or max out your own datacenter.  

You can check out this post I wrote about it a couple of months ago for further details. 

Since I am a Facebook addict my kind of videos talk about how to create a Facebook app...but there are many more on the wiki, so get busy and check it out! And for those who are already busy using zembly to create apps, leave a comment and let us know what you created and where we can find it!

The OSUM Community Web site is getting ready for a makeover!  

Gary Serda has been working on several new features and enhancements to the Web site based largely on the suggestions of OSUM Community members.  Many of the improvements are slated to be released by the end of the month, but some of the decisions are not yet final! 

There is a poll up on the front page of OSUM where you can vote between two completely new looks for the OSUM Web site, or vote to keep it just the way it is.  The poll is now open and will close on Tuesday, July 14 at 5 p.m. 

So share your opinion and have a say in the new look for the OSUM community!  I myself am partial to the blue design, but it is definitely going to be a tight vote between blue and green.

And please encourage all of your other OSUM club members to participate.  And for those who don't know what OSUM is, check it out and sign on.  It is a great community of students who are passionate about and dedicated to Free and Open Source Software and how it is Changing (Y)Our World.