Solaris 10 University Challenge
Sun Microsystems is sponsoring a new contest for university students, involving the creation of new applications or porting existing applications to the Solaris/OpenSolaris platform.
One individual or one team of up to four individuals from the same university will be awarded the Grand Prize - US$5,000 prize purse per individual, plus a Sun Ultra 20 Workstation. The winner's university will receive a credit with a retail value of US$100,000 good towards the purchase of Sun Microsystems products including Sun Fire x64 systems and UltraSPARC processor-based systems.
We talked to Glynn Foster of GNOME/Sun/OpenSolaris....
Q: As a driving force behind the Open-Solaris community, What kinds of projects could be worked on that would highly benefit the Open-Solaris and GNOME communities?
A: Since we first started shipping GNOME 2.0 on Solaris we ran into problems of not being able to ship certain applications or applets that didn't port to the Solaris platform. With the re-introduction of Solaris x86, and now the OpenSolaris community, this can now start to change. Within the Sun desktop team, we're focused on closing that gap and
providing a significantly better user experience to get many of the applications working out of the box. There's no excuses now, and we're focusing on 'Just works' as much as anyone else.
From a high level, projects could include anything from getting bluetooth, pda's and portable media players working nicely, to zero-conf networking and power management. Even if you don't code, you may be able to make contributions in documentation, or community building by
starting pilot programs or Solaris related courses in your university.