In December we launched a survey to find out bit more about our users and identify what locales are important for them. During a month period we collected 213 answers with participants from all over the world.

To reward some of those who took their time and answered our questions we announced that 20 free T-shirts will be given out. The draw took place in the SUN office in Prague and lucky winners have been contacted and will receive their T-shirts soon.

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How to clone and start IPS repository on local disk. The access to SWAN is necessary for this How to.[Read More]

Have you ever worked with an application which was so badly designed, that you could hardly use it? Well, maybe it was not that bad, but i'm sure everyone ran into some piece of software that had chaotic menus, illegible fonts or something like that. Luckily, the internet is full of software that covers the same functions so the user has always a variety of choices. If one application does not satisfy his needs, he can most of the time easily switch to another. Clearly, usability plays a key role when choosing what software people will use. Still it is very underestimated and many designers pay limited attention to it. And this should be changed as soon as possible...
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As current OpenSolaris 2008.11 binary distro have several options how to change keyboard layouts, there are still some issues reported by users which are a bit confused about Input Method Switcher GUI, which is default tool to switch between various input methods and keyboard layouts. From any reason if you not satisfied with the tool or keyboard layout there is not the one you need there is still option which can bring all the comfort of switching between keyboard layouts using your preferred shortcut.

The solution is based on setxkbmap utility and desktop shortcuts. OpenSolaris is using GNOME by default by almost all other window managers provide possibility to create custom keyboard shortcut, which is all what is needed.

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Taking the advantage of the Christmas break, I took the time and migrated my system from well-known Debian Linux to OpenSolaris. My goal was to make the new environment match my Linux setup as close as possible. Among other things, this meant moving from KDE 3.5.x to GNOME, which I was avoiding as much as possible until now, and Nimbus (the look&feel is great!). Maybe some of the remarks obtained during this process can be interesting for others.

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