As Sun's G11n QA group would like to work publicly we have decided to open our testing to wider audience. It covers sharing the test results, test infrastructure as well as to enable everyone interested to help with the OpenSolaris testing.

 Our first major initiative was to establish OpenSolaris G11n Test Group. Now we would like to start test execution and thus test group has launched test campaign for OpenSolaris 2009.06 Binary Distro. You can see more (test plan, test areas and matrices etc ..) at: http://wikis.sun.com/display/g11n/OpenSolarisBDTesting ...[Read More]

Today, March 25, 2009 Adobe has announced an availability of Adobe Reader 9.1 for OpenSolaris (or Solaris) on x86 platform. After several months when a plan for releasing Adobe Reader for (Open)Solaris x86 was revealed at Adobe blog and different forums, wishes become reality and you can freely download the reader from their sites.

I personally downloaded and installed .pkg.bz2 version in English on my OpenSolaris box (b109) and it worked as expected. Perfect! And note that Reader is available for different languages for example Japanese, French or German.

• How to easy jumpstart Solaris and OpenSolaris

• Just one DHCP server in our subnet

• Run our post install automated tests without manual reboot (AI didn't reboot automatically after installation)

• What if the boot from net option is set as a permanent in GRUB  

• Possibility to install both language supports (slim and global CD)

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The instructions on how to build Caiman gate and get these packages: SUNWauto-install, SUNWgui-install, SUNWinstall-libs, SUNWstosreg, SUNWbeadm, SUNWinstall, SUNWinstall-test, SUNWdistro-const, SUNWinstalladm-tools and SUNWslim-utils

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I was looking for information about how to publish just one package which will contain information for both architecture (SPARC and x86).
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Trying to describe some basic and some interesting facts about using Mercurial Patch Queues.

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Would you like to know who is behind this blog? I was asked several times about the name of our team blog - SUNWg11nprg, or in other words, what the hell SUNWg11nprg is and why it is so complicated? OK, I'd like to take this opportunity and describe who we are and why we have such name.

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Programs should respect locale specific way how to format date, time, numbers, how to sort strings, etc. People in different regions use different ways how to write such things and it is very confusing for them if you for example want write a date and write day, month and year in wrong order. Near all programs use for this functions from libc like strftime(3C), strcoll(3C), ...

The article is short overview how it works.

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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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As a part of a process of extending language/locale support in OpenSolaris we started to prioritize locales that are missing in OpenSolaris but are available on other systems. We already collected decent amount of data and now we would like to get input from you!

We also want to use this opportunity to find out what other globalization features (localization, translations, available encodings...) are important for you.

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Customizing IIIM (Internet/Intranet Input Methods) in Solaris & OpenSolaris

A frequently asked question these days is how to customize IIIM (Input Methods) in OpenSolaris; it is difficult to find any value information on how to work with or how to modify the IIIM. There are some projects being developed to make IIIM more user-friendly but most probably they wont be finished soon, or at least they have not been finished yet.

I played a bit with IIIM data on my installed system and I was able to customize my keyboard layout with Input Methods; it might not be a very elegant way how to do it, but it works and it is very easy to do, so here is it...[Read More]