Sun Microsystems
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Yesterday on NPR, Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems, was interviewed on a variety of subjects. At one point during the interview he shows off his desktop to the interviewer, and reads off a list of GNOME games....
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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.
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GNOME 2.12.0 has been ported to Sun Solaris x86
Ken Mays of Blastwave.org has ported GNOME 2.12.0 to Sun Solaris x86 and has stable packages available for downloading at: http://www.blastwave.org/testing
Instructions for downloading other Blastwave packages are available in the user guide and mirrors section of the Blastwave organization's website.
Michael Gernoth is the lead maintainer of GNOME for Blastwave.
GNOME is one of the primary desktop environments used for Sun Solaris and is supported and maintained by the Blastwave organization.
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It hasn't had a great deal of publicity yet, but Sun released its first version of the Java Desktop System for Solaris last week-- specifically, for Solaris 9 x86 on the new Java Workstations (although it will work on other S9 x86 machines too).
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jdshelp.org is a new website now available for users of the Sun Java Desktop system. It contains various resources such as news, forums, RPMS, how-tos and more.
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Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW - News) today
announced that Allied Irish Bank (AIB), one of Ireland's largest banking and
financial services organizations, a significant private sector employer and
one of Europe's largest indigenous companies, will migrate 7,500 desktop users
and transition branch dependent applications across its entire branch network
to the Sun Java(TM) Desktop System.
Read Press Release
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Slashdot is running a story about how Sun is relasing their JDesktop Integration Conmponents under the LGPL license. A nice and interesting move by Sun which is sure to bring some new aspects into the ongoing debate on wether GNOME in the future should promote the use of Java or Mono or both for our desktop components. Story with links and comments on Slashdot
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A whole slew of stories have been hitting the wires about possible deployments of Sun Microsystems new Java Desktop System. Here is a sampling:
Sun Microsystems beats Microsoft to secure contract
Sun Strikes Software Deal With United Kingdom
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OSNews has an in-depth review of Sun's Java Desktop System based on the final code that will ship in a few days, complete with numerous screenshots.
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It's debut week for Java Desktop System- a product in
which Sun Microsystems Inc. has combined Linux,
Mozilla, GNOME and StarOffice-creating a credible
challenger to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows and Office on
the corporate desktop.
In eWEEK Labs' tests of the final build, we found Java
Desktop System (formerly code-named Mad Hatter)
approachable and functional, with design tweaks to make
the product match more closely to Windows for the
benefit of users unfamiliar with Linux.
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OSNews runs has an interview with the Sun Java Desktop Group about their GNOME Based Java Desktop. Not that much news for the regular gnomedesktop reader, but still interesting.
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According to this article on news.com Sun has signed a deal with a consortium of Chinese companies to use their GNOME based Java-desktop. He further states that the deals they have lined up means that they will deploy between 500 000 and a million desktops in 2004, making them the biggest vendor of Linux based desktops. GNOME's future is indeed looking bright.
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As seen on Slashdot so do Linuxvoodoo run a nice article describing and discussing the Sun Java Desktop. The article gives some nice information about what kind of additions Sun has added to their implementation of a GNOME Linux desktop.
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Available this fall, Project Mad Hatter will offer a new but familiar desktop operating platform based on Linux. A Solaris OS edition will be ready shortly thereafter. "We're integrating all these desktop components [Gnome, Mozilla, Java technology, Evolution, and the StarOffice suite] into a familiar look-and-feel to reduce retraining," says Ulander. And more important, he adds, Sun will deliver on its four-to-one value proposition using these alternatives.
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Three years after pledging to integrate its Solaris operating system with the open-source GNU Object Model Environment (GNOME) desktop, Sun Microsystems Inc. is finally ready to deliver.
