As a part of SUN roadshow events,my college SUN campus ambassador megha had suggested we reach out to college near trichy and help them get started with sun technologies .
Thanks to Harishyam ,we landed up first at JJCET ,its about an an hour and half from NITT campus and yes they did have an impressive admin building and vast areas of free grounds to play .
We first went in to meet HOD of CSE dept Prof. A Saravanan and he was a nice man,we talked about how sun reaches out in our college ,how JJCET can benefit from SUN workshops and what they can do to get more of their students in to opensource technologies .
After talking with him we left to meet the students in the Supernova Labs ( Name of a conference hall with computers ) .The attendence was good 60+ for a single session .
First megha kickstarted by playing some SUN videos ,about sun as a company ,opensolaris and then she started out with SUN campus ambassador programs .
People were interested and iam sure they would want one from their college too ,hope sun is listening :) .
The she spoke about about Netbeans ,Java and some introduction to opensolaris .
After her talks ,i took over i started with opensolaris,not many knew about linux ,so i started with the licenses on opensource,CCDL,free software and then jumped to opensolaris os.
Made a few slides with features that differentiate GNU/Linux with opensolaris like DTrace,ZFS,Zones,SMF and also talked about how Zones is diferent from virtual machines .
Some had doubts and we were more than happy to get them set .
And finaly we let them know our email address and also our mailing list so that people can reach us when they need too .
I think after the response we saw ,the need to reach out to more colleges deeper into country is very important for sun .The NIT’s the IIT’s are always going to have that edge interms of resources to compete with the world and it is the responsibilty of poeple commited to free and opensource philosophy to take this to another level and hel people who dont have the resources to compete with the world and arm them with enough ammunitions to get going .Sure it will take time but the future mist be bright ! .
I hope SUN is listening and i would love to help them setup a campus club at JJCET .Harishyam is a good candidate for the ambassador .
The slides are on their way out so incase you want to have the slides from us either mail us or just keep looking in this space here ! we will put it up .
And yes we clicked some pics too :)
http://theyagar.com/photos/?level=album&id=5 [tags]opensolaris,foss,jjcet,nitt[/tags]

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Now that we have an official Open Solaris user group in our college ,i can find execuses to find computers and free internet .Last weekend i download belenix 0.6.1 and wanted to test it out .So i created some extra gigs on my laptop and installed it out .

Surprising that even though belenix has come out as a full fledged OS,it doesnt have an easy to use GUI installer .It can be difficult especially with partitioning a mistake here can rob you of your entire data on the disk . I tried it out and luckily didn’t screw it up .

After the installation finishes through and it asks for installing grub in mbr ,i say yes and when i reboot i end up with a dreadful GRUB> :( .I so very hate this grub prompt .

And then i had to look for the old commands to find my partition to load from ,and add to that the tabfor kernel path that i usually use in fedora or ubuntu is not there :( .

So,for people who got stuck like me ,here is what you need to do

GRUB> find /boot/grub/stage1

It returns something like ( hd0,2,a) [ for me]

then do

GRUB> root (hd0,2,a)

and it should tell you that the partition is ufs

GRUB> kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot kernel/unix

It should tell you that kernel has been loaded

GRUB> module /platform/i86pc/boot_archive

GRUB>boot

and now you should see the belenix 0.6.1 booting up.

Apart form this ,belenix is wonderful.light (my laptop has 256 MB ram ) and also contains netbeans ( My fav java IDE) and yeah it obviously comes with DTrace .

And yeah for those with NVidia ,you have compiz too :).

If i have to give it a rating out of 10 i would give it atleast 8 ,and that too only because of its less user friendly installer,somehow installer is the first thing a user sees and it shouldn’t be put off .May be if belenix was a part of code for freedom i would love to write an installer for it in pygtk or gtk for that matter

I definitely suggest people try and use belenix .its not the best but no reasons why it can’t be :)

you can download from here

http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/?q=download

[tags]opensolaris,belenix[/tags]

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i was looking at the release of ubuntu studio and i was impressed by their new gdm theme,wallpaper,icon set and boot splash but installing the whole distro was of no use to me and so installed just the themes and i love this new look .

Boot splash

GDM theme

and now how to get them

From your terminal run the following two commands

sudo su -c 'echo deb http://archive.ubuntustudio.org/ubuntustudio feisty main >> /etc/apt/sources.list’
wget -q http://archive.ubuntustudio.org/ubuntustudio.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update

and then

sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-theme ubuntustudio-icontheme ubuntustudio-icon ubuntustudio-wallpaper ubuntustudio-artwork

and then to set the boot splash screen ,this command should work

sudo update-alternatives –config usplash-artwork.so

This will display all the available boot splash themes on your system and choose the studio one .

and to set the gdm theme , exec

sudo gdmsetup choose the studio theme ,similarly for icon and theme

sudo gnome-theme-manager and choose

Enjoy the new look :)

[tags] ubuntu,ubuntustudio,linux[/tags]

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I Loved the SUN desktop that came with my solaris express and belenix but running Compiz on solaris was just great ,true as it said eye candy .Its really cool thing .

Check the Blog post on it Here from Erwann

The sad thing :( my laptop doesnt have Nvidia card and neither does the machines in my lab :( .

Hope to get it working somewhere i would love it :)

[tags]opensolaris,compiz,xgl[/tags]

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Its time for opensolaris:) .

After a long list of dektops and GNU/Linux variants now i just moved over to Opensolaris and i must tell you it looks impressive .I had with me the starter-kit i got from Foss.in and the installation was smooth on my HP NX500 laptop .

On login ,the desktops offered were GNOME and CDE ,being a gnome lover i immediateky chose GNOME desktop and i loved the look and feel of it .It was really nice to see GNOME2.14 in it ,i remember i had downloaded solaris10 sometime ago and saw gnome1.xx in it :( .

One difference here is that GNU tools are not added to your path by default so ,dont be shocked if you type gcc and it screams “gcc command not found ” ;) .

just add export PATH=$PATH:/sfw and you can access all the GNU tools and i then wanted to build ldtp on it and once i did with ./configure i realised make wasnt found :( .i tried looking for it in many places and still didnt find .

Only to later realise when i pinged bala that its actually gmake :).

Opensolaris certainly is feel good experience but i would love to do more than just use become a opensolaris hacker soon :) and i would want to work on accessibility tools,since thats something i do understand a lot better thanks to ldtp

but i was disappointed was i could not find any package updater or package maintainer installed i loved the apt-gets and yums so much :( and i dont know how to do updates . wish there was repository ! :(

update: Bala just gave me a link to package maintainer in opensolaris ,it doesnt come with the distro but can be seperately downloaded from http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/pkg-get.html

[tags]opensolaris,ldtp[/tags]

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