When a Java developer wishes to create a desktop application in OpenSolaris they need to create an application that will integrate well with the existing GNOME desktop. This means that it should share the same native look and feel as the desktop theme, it should use the native system dialogs, it should use the native configuration engine and in every respect look and behave like a native GNOME desktop application.

There are a number of choices available to the developer. They can use an application framework such as the Swing application framework that is part of the Java SE or the SWT framework provided by Eclipse. However, if they are already GNOME developers and familiar with Glade/GTK based development then they will have to learn yet another framework which can of course be very time consuming. The Java-Gnome bindings offer another alternative. It is a set of Java bindings for the GNOME Platform libraries and the Freedesktop.org Cairo 2D drawing engine which allows GNOME and GTK+ applications to be written in Java.

This workshop will explore how to use Java-Gnome to develop Java based GNOME applications on OpenSolaris. Our examples will be developed using the NetBeans IDE. The morning session will focus on building the apps, the afternoon session will look at ways of debugging and tuning Java apps on OpenSolaris using dtrace and other tools. The workshop is intended to be informal and interactive, so I hope the participants will help drive the agenda. We'll have workshop materials prepared to help give it some structure. If people could have Solaris Express (build 55) on their systems with NetBeans and SunStudio 11 that would help a lot. I'll bring along some install DVD's and a few bootable OpenSolaris usb sticks for those that don't.

John Rice is a staff engineer in Sun working with the OpenSolaris Desktop group over the past number of years. Before this he spent time with the OpenOffice team helping to automate migration of macros from MS Office to OpenOffice. He has over 18 years development experience in the software industry, mostly in the area of document management and desktop application development. He is a member of the GNOME Advisory board. John lives by the sea on the east coast of Ireland and can be found at unseasonably early hours of the morning running along the nearby shore, preparing for his next marathon :)

The Service Management Facility (SMF) is a new feature of Solaris 10 and is responsible for the whole life cycle management of the operating systems services like cron, automount, ssh etc. SMF also changes the way a Solaris system starts, stops and restarts services. To benefit most from the SMF functionalities, it is required to integrate own written services with the SMF manifests and understand the way that SMF integrates new services.

This tutorial explains SMF in detail, then starts with the attendees to understand service manifests and helps them to create their own service.

Detlef Drewanz works as Presales Systems Engineer for Sun Microsystems Berlin since 1998. He uses Solaris for more than 15 years. Since 2002 as Ambassador for Operating Systems he is also responsible for communications between the field organization in Germany and the Solaris Marketing and Engineering.

Not only in this role Detlef was heavily involved in a lot of Solaris 10 workshops and key projects during the roll-out of Solaris 10 in the previous 2 years. Integrated part of this work was the adoption of the SMF technology and the discussion of how to create new services. Detlef wants to share some of his real life experiences about this topic.

It is truly an interesting time to be a developer. While at the end of 20th century the parallel machines, the 64 bit machines, the unix machines were all around but they were for the special kinds of tasks and hence for the special kinds of guys. Today we've got multicore 32/64bits unix systems on our desktops.

Sun Studio development tools allow you to use the powerful technologies invented for high end systems of the recent past for performance conscious development on the desktop systems of today.

In this tutorial you will learn how to:

• Achieve maximal performance on a single CPU core before going parallel.
• Create parallel C/C++ programs utilizing multicore CPUs without explicit pthreads manipulations.
• Observe and improve your program's performance behaviour with Sun Studio perfromance tools.

Alexander Gorshenev while working at St. Petersburg Development Center of Sun Microsystems participated in multiple compiler related projects. Ranging from x64 optimizing codegenerator to C compiler project to Linux port of Sun Studio compilers.

The tutorial is for everybody who wants to learn how to build OpenSolaris from source.

Because of the time the build needs we will have an unusual agenda. In the beginning the source (DVDs, Server) is loaded and the build is started.

While the Solaris is building the concepts will be explained and how a already build kernel can be packaged. In the afternoon we will create an installable Solaris media.

Everybody in the audience who wants to build his/her own kernel needs to bring a system installed with Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris build 55 or later, Sun Studio 11, the build tools and the OpenSolaris source. I will bring a server which contains all of this, but copying this to a large number of machines will take too long.

Please everybody in the audience who want to get material should have an account at opensolaris.org and accepted the rules.

Ulrich Gräf is since 1992 employed by Sun and worked in different presales roles. In the first four years he worked as presales SE for the financial industry. The following four years Ulrich helped to build the german Benchmark Center. In the last five years he is working germany-wide in the area of Operating Systems and Performance as an OS Ambassador.

Preceeding his time at Sun Ulrich was working at the Technical University of Darmstadt in the Department of Theoretical Computer Science / Systems Programming group.

This tutorial is intended to cover newbies as well as experienced people about the virtualisation concepts in Solaris. The whole Tutorial is divided into five parts:

1. Virtualisation: what is it and why is it needed?
2. Virtualisation through open solaris: an introduction
3. Zones
   1. concepts
   2. commands and usage.
   3. trouble shooting and debugging.
   4. Zone administration: packaging and patching
   5. internals of Zones
4. Branded Zones: Running linux on top of Solaris Kernel
   1. BrandZ: what is it?
   2. BrandZ commands and usage
   3. Internals
   4. Debugging using dtrace: Cool feature - Linux applications can be debugged inside solaris using dtrace!
5. Virtualization with ZFS!(both solaris zones and branded zones)
6. Para virtualization and other technologies: Xen, QEMU, VMware etc

We will be having hands on sessions and complete demonstration about all the technologies mentioned above! We will be bringing laptops with completely configured OS so that we can show all the technologies like zones, Branded zones, ZFS, XEN, VMware, QEMU etc

Vineeth R Pillai works as a Solaris Sustaing engineer in SUN Microsystems India pvt ltd. He mainly handles issues related to Virtualization( Solaris Zones, Branded Zones), SMF , packaging and patching, Solaris Install commands and libraries. He is also an open solaris evangelist and has given presentations and demonstrations on Solaris technologie to students as well as professionals! He has fixed considerable amount of bugs in the zones and SMF field and has contributed to many zones related projects!

As an open solaris evangelist, he has been to many conferences like FOSS.in(Free and open source software. India), SUN Tech days , Universities and colleges to spread the Solaris technologies. He is also an active member of the Bangalore open solaris User group(BOSUG). He has hands on experience on Virtualisation and related technologies and has internal code level knowledge on the same!

The Service Management Facility (SMF) is a new feature of Solaris 10 and is responsible for the whole life cycle management of the operating systems services like cron, automount, ssh etc. SMF also changes the way a Solaris system starts, stops and restarts services. To benefit most from the SMF functionalities, it is required to integrate own written services with the SMF manifests and understand the way that SMF integrates new services.

This presentation gives a short overview about SMF, explains detailed how new manifests can be build and how existing or new own service can be integrated into SMF.

Slides...

Detlef Drewanz works as Presales Systems Engineer for Sun Microsystems Berlin since 1998. He uses Solaris for more than 15 years. Since 2002 as Ambassador for Operating Systems he is also responsible for communications between the field organization in Germany and the Solaris Marketing and Engineering.

Not only in this role Detlef was heavily involved in a lot of Solaris 10 workshops and key projects during the roll-out of Solaris 10 in the last 2 year. Integrated part of this work is the adoption of the SMF technology and the discussion of how to create new services. Detlef wants to share some of his real life experiences about this topic.

Starting with Solaris 10 the concept of privileges is now a basic component of regular Solaris (previously this concept was only available to Trusted Solaris). Using privileges a fine grained control over the possible actions of a process is possible.

While privileges can be used together with roles and profiles (to allow certain users invocation of commands with extra privileges) another security benefit is important for developers. Developers still create setuid/setgid applications just to perform a single or a few privileged tasks (like binding to a privileged port or writing to a file with special ownership and permissions). Such programs can be hardened by using privileges just for the tasks which require the extra power.

This presentation will explain privileges and how to use them in your own code.

Slides...

Wolfgang Ley (39) has received his diploma in computer science from the TU Clausthal. During the years 1994-1998 he worked at the DFN-CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) and significantly contributed to the buildup of this service. After changing to Sun Microsystems (in 1999) to the Mission Critical Solution Center he works on security aspects as well as on kernel and network internals.

When it comes to application performance, especially in HPC, most developers only think about processing units, caches, compiler flags and algorithms neglecting the influence the Solaris kernel or any other one may have. OpenSolaris as well as Solaris 10 do have a number of outstanding features which provide useful performance and monitoring data to SysAdmins and developers.

The presentations will introduce some not very well known but powerful tools such as 'cpustat', 'cputrack' or 'intrstat as well as features build into the Solaris OS and it's libraries. Beside the theoretical approach, two real life showcases will demonstrate their power to analyze and pin-point tuning possibilities.

With regard to some of their limitations an introduction to DTrace will provide the attendees with the knowledge about how to zoom in from the 10000ft perspective to the kernel part which impacts an application the most. One-line as well as multi-page examples will demonstrate the power of DTrace followed by a brief example on how to add DTrace capabilities to own code.

Slides...

Thomas Nau has 15+ years of experience as a professional in the hard- and software arena. After graduating from Ulm University in 1991 with a Diploma in Physics he worked for some years in a medical school before switching over to the Universities computer center.

His focus for the last years has been on UNIX, mainly Solaris, servers. Participating in a number of beta programs such as the "OpenSolaris Pilot" he tries to stay ahead of the technology curve when it comes to the OS and tools for performance analysis, monitoring or resource management.

Thomas is now the head of the university's communication infrastructure department providing compute-, internet,- and phone services for almost 10.000 people.

Beside his work at the University he likes to give lectures and to consult for the European Union when not busy with his wife and the two kids.

This paper discusses Name Services in the Open Solaris operating system, its current architecture and its further development. In particular it will describe a Duckwater project and correlate it with such projects as Sparks, Reno, Winchester, in their dealing with approachability issues, infrastructure problems and interoperability.

Initially we will consider the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), which is becoming an industry standard for accessing data objects, hierarchically structured as a tree. Major benefits of LDAP are: object schema extensibility, much more granular security control and administration comparing to NIS/NIS+ approaches, good scalability and availability with respect to how the Directory Information Tree (DIT) can be split among several Directory Servers, increasing data volume and performance. So, actually most of central repository solutions are based on LDAP, and consequently the future of Solaris Name Services is closely conjugated with LDAP.

Fortunately, the Solaris OS natively supports LDAP, i.e. all client machines can use common information about users, accounts, groups, hosts, networks, printers auto mounts and so on from a directory. This paper explains the most frequent questions and points with regard to a native LDAP environment setup, such as SSL-ed communication, pluggable authentication modules, Kerberized authentication, self-credentialed lookup, Directory User Agent (DUA) profiles, dynamic configuration cache and so on.

When talking about Name Services improvement, we can look ahead into projects, aim of which is to bring these services to the next level - Sparks focuses on the name service switch, its performance and security, Reno adjusts the login process, Winchester provides interoperability with Microsoft Active Directory, Duckwater covers approachability issues, paying much attention on auto-discovery features. From a big picture perspective, all of these projects together with a completed Network Auto Magic (NWAM) will hit the target of "plug connector to the wall and work".

Slides...

Slava Leanovich is an Individual Contributor at Sun Microsystems, joined the company recently in January 2006, responsible for the engineering of Name Services as a part of Solaris operating system development.

Prior to Sun, Slava worked as a project leader at IBM's business partner sinse 1999, doing enterprise applications development based on Java/J2EE and Mainframe technologies. During that time he accomplished several research activities in resource virtualization, transactional computing areas, and published results in academic journal. He is IBM certified solutions expert in DB2 UDB.

Before this, Slava was with PM&S Software GmbH, where he worked as a systems programmer. Slava holds a master's of computer science degree from Belarus State University.

The aim of this talk is to describe the Korn Shell 93 [ksh93] Integration Project, outlining the origins and goals of the project. We describe the "new" Korn Shell [ksh93] features, and its improvements/advantages over the "old" korn shell [ksh88]: performance, usability, administration, localisation, internationalisation, mathematical functions, networking and builtin commands, and its components, including libshell - the ksh93 core library.

We present our project's status and progress, focusing on architectural difficulties and problems we encountered and solved.

We further describe the Solaris specific changes to ksh93, and outline future directions for this project: short-term, mid-term and long-term goals, and migration/update status of /usr/bin/ksh [ksh88] to "ksh93" within Solaris and OpenSolaris-based distributions.

We also outline the future utilisation of ksh93 and libshell within the Solaris Operating Environment's core components, as well as various components-related changes and enhancements planned for ksh93.

Finally we provide a description what could/should be done in a (revised) future POSIX shell standard.

Slides...

Roland Mainz is a programmer, student and sysadmin expert who has been using Unix and Internet technologies since 1995 and is involved in application development around MPEG and later simulations design and programming which provided him with lots of experience in High Performance Environments [HPC] environments, parallel programming and general application design and system administration in scientific and medical environment.

Roland's main area of expertise are parallel and distributed computing related topics.

As an experienced Solaris user, Roland joined OpenSolaris.org in February 2006 and co-founded the "ksh93-integration project" to work on the update of Solaris's old korn shell to the newer version and it's tight integration into the Solaris operating system and the products based on it.

Roland Mainz is currently a student at the "Fachhochschule Gießen-Friedberg" (Higher Technical Institute/University Of Applied Sciences) in Germany.

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems, including Solaris. It is fully ACID compliant, has full support for foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures (in multiple languages). PostgreSQL includes most of SQL92 and SQL99 data types, including INTEGER, NUMERIC, BOOLEAN, CHAR, VARCHAR, DATE, INTERVAL, and TIMESTAMP. It also supports storage of binary large objects, including pictures, sounds, or video. It has native programming interfaces for C/C++, Java, .Net, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, ODBC, among others, and exceptional documentation.

The talk will explain how PostgreSQL 8.1 and 8.2 are integrated into OpenSolaris, describe how to use SMF for starting, stopping server and how to set SMF properties. It will also demonstrate how to use DTrace probes in the Postgres 8.2 for monitoring and analyzing locks and transaction duration.

Performance is one of the very important parameters of each database. PostgreSQL has a lot of tuning parameters. Most of them are common for all platforms and they are related to the memory size, CPU speed and database size. Some of them are related to OS and they have big impact on performance. There are also a lot of Solaris kernel parameters, which may have impact on the PostgreSQL performance. File system selection and tuning is also very important. All these tuning hints will be also covered in the talk.

Slides...

Author has twenty years experience of computer programing and seven year experience with databases. His first experience was developing application on PostgreSQL version 6.5. From this date, Postgres is his favorite database. He also has experience with developing application and administrating databases like Interbase/Firebird, MSSQL and Oracle database.

Author works as database sustaining engineer for SUN Microsystems, Czech Republic, and his primary focus is make "sweet home" for PostgreSQL on Solaris. His responsibility is finding and fixing bug in the HADB (High Availability Database - part of JES) as well.

Best practices of running Web (2.0) applications on OpenSolaris.

An introduction, which features of OpenSolaris are useful to run Web Applications more efficient than on other *n*x plattforms.

Table of contents:

• LAMP or SAMP ?
• JAVA Application Server on OpenSolaris
• SMF for your service
• Tuning OpenSolaris für WebApps
• Connect your Network more reliable
• Useful ZFS Tunings
• When to run local zones and when not, or even LDOMs
• Coolthreads vs. AMD Opteron
• Collect your server perfomance statistics
• ..

Slides...

Thorleif Wiik, Dipl.-Ing.(FH)

Curriculum vitae:

1993-1998 Studies of Computer Science and Engineering at FHTW Berlin

1994-1998 FHTW Berlin, Hochschulrechenzentrum Student assistant, UNIX administration on IRIX, HP-UX and Solaris

Since 1998 Pixelpark AG, now Senior Systemarchitekt and Director IT. Responsible for planning, securing, operating and optimizing web architecures for the company's clients.

The talk explains the background for creating the first OpenSolaris based distribution. It explains the early days of the creation of OpenSolaris, names missing files/software and describes how the missing code has been replaced by free stuff.

The talk starts with the first public announcements for OpenSolaris and gives an overview about the time before OpenSolaris was actually published. It tries to give an overview about the time and effort that was needed in order create Schillix while OpenSolaris was not yet officially published. It explains why it was possible to publish the first working OpenSolaris based distribution only three days after Sun officially published the first set of OpenSolaris sources.

It includes current problems with the SchilliX project and gives an overview about the future of the project. To the end, questions from the auditorium are answered. Finally, there will be a discussion about how it is possible to help the SchilliX project and how the project should be presented to users and possible co-maintainers.

Slides...

Jörg Schilling is working with SunOS/Solaris since spring 1985. He runs a Sun system at home since May 1986. His master thesis (1990) was a "WORM" filesystem for SunOS-4.0 that was designed to be "fsck free".

He is the author of the oldest free "tar" implementation "star" and he is known as the author cdrtools/cdrecord.

See also:

• http://www.opensolaris.org/viewProfile.jspa?username=joerg
• http://www.opensolaris.org/os/article/2005-05-06_profile__j_rg_schilling/

Nexenta Operating System, also known as GNU/Solaris, is a combination of the enterprise class OpenSolaris kernel with GNU userland applications provided by Debian/GNU and Ubuntu Operating Systems.

Members of the GNU/Solaris project believe that the combination of OpenSolaris kernel with Debian's dpkg based packaging system and big network repositories of properly packaged and integrated applications coming not only from GNU world are the right way to go for ordinary users, developers, and administrators who would rather concentrate on their business competitive advantages than on infrastructure problem solving.

The talk will summarize the past of GNU/Solaris development, describe the main features and competitive advantages of GNU/Solaris, along with its development model, and promises for the future. It will also concentrate on some problematic aspects of free software and opensource that are directly touching development of GNU/Solaris.

Author is a long term Debian/GNU, Ubuntu user and developer who has recently joined the GNU/Solaris project to help create modern, stable, and enterprise ready Operating System that will combine the best features from Linux/GNU userland and OpenSolaris kernel.

Author works as sustaining engineer for SUN Microsystems, Czech Republic, spending most of his time by finding, and hunting various types of bugs in applications written in dozens od programming languages and using more than dozens various enterprise technologies.

In his spare time, he promotes the usage of free software, hacks on various parts of GNU/Solaris and participates actively in events organized by the Czech Opensolaris User Group.

More info about the author: http://martinman.net
More info about Czech OpenSolaris User Group: http://opensolaris.cz

Sun kept its promise to opensource Solaris under a OSI approved license, the CDDL: On June 14th 2005 Sun Microsystems released OpenSolaris to the public. And just four days later the first 3rd party distro, SchilliX, hit the streets. Belenix and Nexenta/GNU-Solaris followed soon after and their initial versions were released in Q4 2005. However, a closer look revealed that none of them supported SPARC yet. When this had not changed over the months, I decided in April 2006 to release my internal prove of concept sun4u-LiveDVD as "marTux_0.1" - making available for the first time a working Xorg server binary for SPARC-Solaris. A major update, "marTux_0.2", followed in summer 2006 and added among others the following features:

• support for UltraSPARC_1 based sun4u systems (Rainer Orth's patch)
• initial sun4v platform support
• x86 and x64 platform support
• 1st open distro able to boot into Xorg in amd64 mode (aperture patch)
• Moinak Ghosh's hsfs and lofi patches applied (doubled DVD capacity, 4 times the throughput)
• SVR4 pkgadd tools added and pkg database populated
• full 9GB "/opt/csw" on standard 4.3GB DVD media (@ see Moinak Ghosh's patches !! ) [BTW, "/opt/csw" will be dropped from upcoming "marTux_0.3" on --->> then replaced by future "/opt/mrtx" stack of MRTX packages]

Though this presentation will briefly outline the history of marTux, it will rather focus on the upcoming line of marTux releases that will be based on the RPM package management system, while still maintaining SVR4 pkgadd compatibility.

Slides...

Martin Bochnig, born in 1977 in Berlin

Education: Studying Mathematics "TWM" at Technical University Berlin.

Certifications: SCSA, SCNA SCSECA, TOEFL (currently preparing for SCJP_j2se1.5 and SCJD due in March 2007)

Interests: Solaris (sparc preferred), qemu, Xorg, ieee1275

LiveMedia for OpenSolaris is an attractive and important new direction made possible after the opening up of Solaris source code. This was pioneered by Joerg Schilling via his SchilliX LiveCD distribution of OpenSolaris.

Subsequently I had come out with the BeleniX LiveCD distribution that introduced several new technologies in OpenSolaris required to make LiveMedia practical and useful. All the modifications and new features for LiveMedia will be integrated into OpenSolaris and the future Install roadmap of SUN's Solaris Express distribution includes the Live distro format. The Solaris Express Install DVD will be a Live bootable DVD with an install option. In addition LiveMedia make various other things possible, like product trial CDs, system recovery CDs, system test CDs, system in a pocket using USB media etc.

The LiveMedia technologies umbrella project is located at: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/livemedia/ and concerns not only Live CDs but also other forms of Live Media like USB Keys.

This presentation talks about all the above topics including future work:

• Details of current technologies available like:
  • Grub based CD boot
  • Ramdisk
  • On the fly decompression
  • HSFS I/O Scheduling optimizations
  • ISO Data Block reorganization algorithm using data from DTrace Toolkit and mkisofs "-sort" option.
  • Numerous tweaks and changes to bootup scripts and utilities
• Changes for USB based live media
• BeleniX Remastering Toolkit
• Solaris Express LiveKit
• Current utilization of LiveMedia possibilities in SUN
• What futher work needs to be done like:
  • UnionFS
  • Multisession DVDs (Similar to Puppy Linux)
  • Preserving sessions when booting off USB keys
  • Encrypting sessions
  • OpenSolaris recovery toolkit
  • Ability to use Linux swap without corrupting it
  • Dump CD to RAM
  • Anything else ...

Slides...

Moinak Ghosh works for SUN Microsystems in the Solaris Sustaining team in Bangalore, India. He has been with SUN for the past 3.5 years. While in SUN, he has helped Brian Kernighan fix an obscure 30 yr old AWK bug in "some of the most mysterious code known to man" (http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/awkbook/). Prior to joining SUN he worked at Cisco's offshore development center at HCL Technologies Chennai(350 Km from Bangalore). He has been using Solaris (and Linux) for the past 8+ years. His first exposure to computing was in 1990 on the amazing BBC Microcomputer (8-bit Motorola 6502).

He works on the BeleniX project in his spare time and started the project in August 2005. Initially it was mostly a one-man effort and has subsequently got a bunch of contributors. He developed the various critical technologies required to make Live CDs practical for OpenSolaris. He mentored Anil Gulecha the college student who put BeleniX on a USB Key.

He is also involved with various OpenSolaris efforts in India like the Bangalore OpenSolaris User's Group and has spoken at various forums like SUN Tech Days, College presos etc.

Producing Solaris SVr4 binary packages used to be a tedious manual process. First you build the sources, any way you want, then write a bunch of text files that describe the package contents, dependencies and list the package contents. Whenever you build a newer version of the code, you will need to manually update these files. This process is lengthy, boring and, most importantly, error prone. But there is an easier way.

The GNOME team at Sun Microsystems uses a build tool called pkgbuild, which uses RPM-like build recipes (called spec files) for controlling the build from downloading the sources and making code changes to packaging the binaries. These tools make it really simple to build Solaris-compatible SVr4 packages from source code.

Since pkgbuild was modelled from rpmbuild, pkgbuild is best suited for building open source software from versioned release tarballs. Updating a package to a newer version is often as simple as changing the version number in the recipe. This presents an advantage over other build systems used on Solaris: it's very easy to get started. This is especially true because RPM has a large user base and there is plenty of documentation and tutorials available. RPM is also part of the Linux Standard Base.

pkgbuild is gradually gaining popularity and various people contributed spec files to the SFE (spec-files-extra) repository, which now counts nearly 200 entries.

This talk will briefly introduce spec files and describe typical usage of the pkgbuild tools, illustrated with some live demos.

Slides...

Damien Carbery joined Sun's Desktop team in 2003. He has been using pkgbuild since early 2004, when the author, Laszlo Peter, a Sun colleague, released the first version. He doesn't know what he would do without pkgbuild. He's made a few contributions to the SFE repository.

Damien got his B.Eng in Electronic Engineering from Dublin City University when it was still quite small.

MythTV is an open source set of programs used to "build the mythical home media convergence box". It includes a PVR application, a DVD viewer, a web browser and more. It works under Linux and Mac OS X, but not OpenSolaris yet.

The Apple Mac Mini is a small form factor personal computer. It is smaller than six CD jewel cases, had video cable adapters for most display connectors, analog and digital audio outputs, an IEEE-1394 (Firewire) port, several USB ports and even a remote control. All it needs is an integrated tuner to make a consumer electronics appliance. This year Apple introduced versions based on Intel x86-compatible processors, chipsets and graphics processors. Other individuals are in the process of porting OpenSolaris to other Intel-based Macs. However, drivers for some of the components included in the Mac Mini are not yet available.

The paper will discuss the issues encountered during the porting effort. The work proceeded in several steps. First, MythTV was ported to OpenSolaris running on a stable platform. Next, OpenSolaris was ported to the Mac Mini. Then, MythTV was brought over to the Mac Mini.

Slides...

Alan Perry is a Staff Engineer in the Solaris x86 Core Development Group at Sun Microsystems. His primary area of responsibility is development of the Solaris IEEE-1394 infrastructure and class drivers.

Before joining Sun (the first time), he worked on the kernel and drivers for many versions of Unix including AIX, SINIX (at Siemens-Nixdorf Informationsysteme in Munich), LynxOS and HP-UX. He worked for Sun from 1994 to 1997, where he was exposed to IEEE-1394. He then worked for various IEEE-1394 companies, mostly in the consumer electronics software and firmware, and served on various 1394 Trade Association Working Groups. He rejoined Sun in 2003 and has served in his current position since then.

He has been working on the OpenSolaris/Mac Mini/MythTV project in his spare time. He started it because it seemed a natural fit for his current responsibilities with the Solaris IEEE-1394 infrastructure and av1394 class driver and past experience in consumer electronics and set-top boxes.

A presentation about how and why Sun is opening Solaris, the current status of the project, the future plans for community growth around the world, and some of the challenges the implementation team has had to overcome. The presentation is told primarily from the perspective of a community-building effort but also touches on engineering processes and the overall business case for OpenSolaris. The scope of history ranges from the project's inception more than a year prior to launch right up through to the present day. The talk is designed to not only inform but also to generate community participation in OpenSolaris.

Slides...

Jim Grisanzio is the Community Manager on the OpenSolaris Project. He is based out of Sun Microsystems' Tokyo office and works for the company's OpenSolaris Engineering Organization. Jim has been the Community Manager since the project's inception (more than a year before launch), he has managed multiple community-development efforts for OpenSolaris, and he has a background in technical & scientific communications and project management.

More background: