Campus Ambassador Life at NUS Dang Thanh Son's blog

JavaFX Coding Challenge where students as well as developers are invited to submit an innovative rich media application using JavaFX 1.1 and NetBeans 6.5.

The contest has top three prizes of $25,000, $10,000 and $5,000. Students can compete for these top prizes. Additionally, there are special prizes just for students -- 3 top student applications will receive $1,500 each. There are 100 honorable mention prizes in the contest.

The contest runs from March 23rd to May 29th.

All the details will be available here

The default Live CD OpenSolaris installation does not come with GNU gcc. Therefore, you need to install it by yourself.

Go to System->Administration->Package Manager

Search for gcc

Tick SUNWgcc and click Install

that's simple =)

well, I just visited youtube and found out that I need to install Flash player in order to watch the video there.

How to install - step-by-step

1. When you visit youtube and do not have Flash player installed, youtube will point you to Adobe website where you download the Solaris version of flash player to your machine.

2. Untar that file.

3. Open terminal.

4. #su

5. cp <place you untar ur downloaded player>/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/

6. restart firefox

Hi all,

You may notice that the default music and video players in OpenSolaris is not so good. They cannot play many file types. Therefore, I install VLC.

How to install - step by step:

1. Open terminal.

2. #su (to have root privilege)

3. # pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.lifewithsolaris.jp:10000/ lifeiwthsolaris.jp

4. # pkg refresh --full

5. # pkg install LWSvlc

It will automatically install VLC on ur machine.

Source: http://lifewithsolaris.jp/modules/packages/index.php?content_id=3

hi all,

Remember the last post I said that I need to purchase new NIC card to get internet connection since OpenSolaris does not support my card? I would like to inform you guys that I already got internet connection already.

Murayama just updated new driver for nVidia. I went to his website http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng/ and download ngo driver.

Then I followed the guide here to install the driver http://www.linuxdynasty.org/basic-networking-howto-on-opensolaris.html

After step 16, I got internet connection already.

However, after I reboot my machine, I don't have internet anymore. Googled tell me that I should delete dhcp.nfo0 since dctp cannot be configure that way http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=4749

Hope that help for those who has same problem like me.

Regards,

"Sun is offering a free certification exam titled Sun Certified Specialist NetBeans IDE (SCSNI) during October 15, 2008 thru November 5, 2008. It is a very good opportunity for NetBeans lover to sit for the exam and grab the certificate.

What you need to do is:

• Go to http://www.register.prometric.com/Index.asp
• Choose your location. Click Next
• Under Client, choose Sun Microsystems and under Program, choose Sun Microsystems (310, 311). Click Next
• Read the note and click Next
• Under Exam, choose 311-045 - Sun (TM) Certified Specialist for NetBeans (TM) IDE beta. Click Next
• Choose a test site and click on the corresponding Schedule Appointment
• Choose your prefer date and time and click Next. You might be asked to log in or register if you are a new user
• Follow the instruction to complete the registration and get the confirmation
• Print out the confirmation. A copy is sent to your mailbox, too
• Revise and prepare for the exam

You can get more information at this website.

Preparation guide for the certificate is here.

Note that the exam date and time can be chosen when u register for the exam at prometric.

*The step-by-step registration instructions above is copied from Huu Bang's blog.

For those people who install OpenSolaris on VirtualBox. If you don't have sound, the below instruction may help

Select "Windows Direct Sound" and "ICH AC97" in VirtualBox configuration.

And then, download and install Open SoundSystem (OSS) Driver for OpenSolaris. (Open terminal and type the below command)

# pkgadd -d
http://www.4front-tech.com/release/oss-solaris-v4.0-1016-i386.pkg

Today I installed OpenSolaris on my machine. I have 2 partitions, the 30Gb for windows and the other 80Gb for OpenSolaris. The installation went smoothly and it took just half an hour for OpenSolaris installed on my machine. However, I got problems. I cannot access internet and there's no sound on my machine.

Below is what I did to make sound work

I downloaded audiohd-2008-08-25.tar.gz from http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/device_drivers/files/ . To install the sound driver

"Untar the file. Then copy the files (audiohd) to the relevant /kernel/drv and /kernel/drv/amd64 directory (backup the old ones).

 Use either the normal (obj32 and obj64) or the debug (debug32 and debut 64) files." - thanks Gilles for that.

I'm still working on how to make internet work =(

At first I thought that my ethernet is nVidia. I found an article http://www.linuxdynasty.org/basic-networking-howto-on-opensolaris.html but got stuck at step 4 "devfsadm -i nfo", "devfsadm: driver failed to attach: nfo"

I used Device Driver Utility under System/Administration, under Network I get "nVidia Corporation Driver Missing". Googled a while I found this article http://blogs.sun.com/dmick/date/20050614  when I changed my /etc/driver_aliases, I added one entry under nfo with the vendor Id and device Id, I got "nfo(Driver Misconfigured)".

I posted my question under OpenSolaris forum and found out that currently there's no driver for my NIC card. Therefore, I need to purchase a new NIC in order to connect to internet >_<

Today, Aakriti and I conducted our workshop at SMU. We were giving the quick introduction about Netbeans, taught the students a few tips/tricks in Netbeans as well as showed them how to integrate Subversion and MySQL in Netbeans. This is the first workshop I do as the Sun Campus Ambassador.

At first there was just a few students turn up. However, after a while more and more students came. Aakriti did a excellent talk about tips and tricks on Netbeans, especially how to use refactor. I did my part which is subverion and MySQL. It's quite amazing that Netbeans really has a lot of funcions and add-on integrations which is extremely useful for progam developers. I already used version control program for my software engineering project so that  I can understand how important it is to have a version control program. For those of you who don't know what subversion is, basically it's a program that helps you keep track of your program files and changes made to those files. In addition, the ability for various people to modify and manage the same set of data is really helpful for many programmers who works on the same project.

You can learn how to use subversion with Netbeans here http://www.netbeans.org/kb/60/ide/subversion.html

Next week, I'm going to do the similar topic but to NUS students. The workshop, "What is subversion and how to use it with Netbeans 6.x", will be at Programming Lab 1, COM1-B10, School of Computing (SOC), NUS.

Another thing which I would like to mention is the Software Freedom Dat (SFD) at NUS. This year we are going to celebrate the SFD the first time at NUS. The event will be on Friday 19 Sept 08 from 1pm to 5pm at Student Foyer COM1-02, SOC, NUS. What we can find at the event is OpenSource introduction talk, OpenSolaris introduction talk, Linux introduction talk, OpenSolaris install-fest, give-away promotion items. Since this is the first time we organize the event, we need a lot of help. So if you are in open source users' group and would like to place a booth at the event to promote the open source program, we are more than welcome you to join us. We are still need helper to do registration work, give out promotion items. So if you want to help, don't hesitate to drop me an email at dang.thanh at sun dot com. Let's together celebrate Software Freedom Day.