Observations of OpenSolaris launch at CommunityOne

By David Stewart (Intel) (70 posts) on May 11, 2008 at 6:59 pm

Cinco de Mayo (May 5, 2008) Sun launched their OpenSolaris 2008.05 distro of the OpenSolaris code. The venue for the launch was CommunityOne, a free one-day conference held on the Monday before JavaOne. Above is a snap of Rich Green who runs software at Sun, doing the launch.

This is the second year that Sun offered CommunityOne for free to whomever would pre-register for the event. It was a good value, since it included lunch, sessions on topics from Linux to Glassfish to MySQL. All attendees got an OpenSolaris 2008.05 LiveCD and a chance to rub shoulders with others interested in their particular field. Ian Murdock set the stage initially in a keynote that explained Sun's role as an aggregater and supporter of various open source technologies into something people can build their businesses on. Ian's presentation slides were art drawings with no words.

Then there was a panel discussion consisting of a broad spectrum of open source luminaries from the Linux Foundation (Jim Zemlin), Red Hat, MySQL, Google and Sun. Actually I think it takes a lot of courage on Sun's part to have a forum discussion like this at their event.

Then Rich Green came on stage to talk about OpenSolaris and its many sources of contribution and features. One really fun demo was a system set up with a series of USB disks in a ZFS pool running raidz. A GUI showed all of the disks reading away, and then Jim Hughes (Sun Fellow) took a sledgehammer to one of the drives. Demo GUI showed the system continuing to run with the drive lost.

The Jeff Bonwick, the lead on ZFS destroyed another drive with a power drill. Finally, two new USB drives were added and the GUI showed the writes flowing on to the new disks to rebuild the RAID configuration.

Steven Hahn showed a "cooking show" demo of installing from the LiveCD and installing from repositories. It was a good set of demos and speeches.

During the conference itself, Intel offered a couple of talks. I gave a general talk on OpenSolaris support on Xeon and Intel's Geeta Krishna talked about wireless support in OpenSolaris and encouraged people to contribute.

Later that night, there was an OpenSolaris launch party at a local sports pub. There might have been more than a little silliness - Here is Jim Hughes sporting an OpenSolaris temporary tattoo and a MySQL dolphin.

After that, JavaOne was actually a blur of keynote prep and giving booth talks. But I did enjoy a particular booth in the trade show floor which featured an oxygen bar. Guess it's a good alternative to breathing those heady fumes of the open source world!

Categories: Open Source, Uncategorized

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Observations of OpenSolaris launch at CommunityOne

By David Stewart (Intel) (70 posts) on May 11, 2008 at 6:59 pm

Categories: Open Source, Uncategorized

Comments (0)

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