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]
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]
