Willie Walker's Weblog

It's been a long time since I started the accessibility work for OpenSolaris. With the OpenSolaris 2008.11 b101a-rc1b release candidate all the pieces of the puzzle have finally come together: eSpeak, the distro constructor, GNOME 2.24, etc. It's been so long in the making that it almost feels anticlimactic for me. A very nice e-mail, however, came across my desk this weekend. I had to pinch myself and even question Josh (the person who posted the message): did he really use OpenSolaris 2008.11? How could this be? Josh responded and confirmed that he just went ahead, downloaded the image, and installed OpenSolaris 2008.11 build 101, release candidate 1b. In base-29 talk, that's "osol-0811-b101-rc1b".

What the what?

Yep, it is actually possible, and Josh shows us that a user can install OpenSolaris independently. I also believe Josh is the first blind person outside Sun to have ever successfully installed OpenSolaris - way awesome. Give that guy a cigar! Note that the user experience is still a little bumpy, but I'm OK with that for 2008.11. Rather than perseverating on a direction that might be completely misguided, I wanted to make 2008.11 a release where we would have *something* for users to try and then transfer user feedback into improvements for 2009.04. This falls in with my belief that we really should let the user requirements drive the architecture and not the other way around.

More information can be found at the following links:

• The official announcement for OpenSolaris 2008.11 b101 rc1b
• ISO images available from the GENUNIX site
• Accessibility notes for the Live CD and Installer

Try it out. Help us make it better. Send your feedback to indiana-discuss at opensolaris dot org. Log bugs and add feature requests at http://defect.opensolaris.org/.