While Colin beat me in blogging about Project Kenai, I think I can still provide some additional background information about this new project hosting service from Sun.

If you are a maintainer of an Open Source project, you currently have plenty of choice when it comes to getting your project hosted for free. One criterion could be your software configuration management system (SCM) of choice.

Some of the hosting services that I am currently aware of and the choice of SCM they offer include:

• BitBucket ( …

Tomorrow (Thursday, 11th of September) at 9:00 PST/16:00 UTC/17:00 GMT/18:00 CET, there will be an new free MySQL University Session. MySQL University started as an internal training program for MySQL engineers, to share and spread knowledge about their areas of expertise and has been available to the public for quite some time now. It covers a wide range of technical topics around the MySQL Server and usually takes place once per week.

For the first time, the presentation will not be performed by (former) MySQL employees/developers, but by two of our "Sun Classic" colleagues: Jyri Virkki (OpenSolaris Web Stack community lead) and Murthy Chintalapati (Sr Engineering Manager, Web Stack development) will talk about the …

It's been over a month (and three hurricanes in America) since I've posted a blog. More than a few of you've noticed - thanks for the prodding...

It's been a busy summer, on nearly every front. Customer activity hasn't slowed down, and the good news surrounding the (otherwise unfortunate) economic crisis embroiling many customers (especially those in the financial services industry, a heavy concentration for Sun) is that it's whipping up the winds of change. Customers facing spending pressure, or tiring of vendor price increases have new options, and there's a new appetite to explore those options (nothing like mandates from the CEO to reduce spending by 50%).

One of my more interesting recent meetings wasn't with a customer, though, it was with an equity analyst from a global financial institution. Equity analysts publish research that feeds the investment community - their (free) research and financial analysis accompanies …

I’d like to inform members of the MySQL™ Community about an amazing Program @ Sun™ Developer Network: the Campus Ambassador Program.

Quote:
Sun has more than 500 campus ambassadors worldwide who help spread knowledge and awareness of leading-edge technologies such as Java™, NetBeans™ IDE, OpenSolaris™, and many more.

Now that MySQL™ is part of SUN™ I guess that you can be ambassador of MySQL™ too, among the other SUN™’s products.

Quote:
Campus ambassadors are Sun™ Microsystems interns who build a Sun™ community on their school or university campus. They learn all about the latest Sun™ open-source technologies and share that knowledge with fellow students. This includes activities such as starting a Sun™ user group on campus, demonstrating Sun™ technology to fellow students, …

Hi,

I needed to install AMP on my OpenSolaris laptop to do some PHP development, and I thought some people would be interested to know how to do this.

Here we go.

AMP is available from the OpenSolaris Web Stack project, which also includes other open source components such as Perl, Ruby, Memcached, Lighthttpd, etc.

The nice thing with OpenSolaris is that - assuming my laptop is connected to the Internet - I can use the Package Manager to automatically download and install AMP on my laptop. I access the Package Manager through the menu System/Administration.

Once the Package Manager is launched, I make sure that the Repository is set to opensolaris.org and  I do a search on amp:

The amp and amp-dev packages are now listed in the selection …

A concise compilation of today's news of interest to TheAquarium readers:

At OSCON, Sun had a huge booth. I mentioned that before, and I was part of the show. During booth opening hours, members of all Sun communities (Open Solaris, Glassfish, OpenJDK, MySQL) addressed the audience with technical presentations.

I was very impressed by these two booklets that were given away to whomever wanted them. They are short, well written, with the sort of practical information that a beginner wants to find immediately.

It's nice to hold them, but books are heavy, especially if you are traveling 6,000 miles with hand luggage only. So it's very nice to find them in the OpenSolaris site.

• Getting started with OpenSolaris 2008.05
• …

Thanks to Glynn for pointing me to the right thread on opensolaris.org (in a comment on my Good adventures with OpenSolaris post). The package verification thingy (pkg verify -v -f SUNWfirefox) did actually throw an error (indicating some sort of problem). So that’s pretty neat. The fact that it got into trouble in the first place isn’t good, but corruption detection is the next best thing.

I still occationally hit the bug in VirtualBox where if you have 127.0.0.1 in your resolv.conf on your host (e.g. running a local caching nameserver), VirtualBox passes this through to the guest, so the guest tries to use the guest 127.0.0.1 as a nameserver - this usually doesn’t work so well.

The good news is, Firefox now works in my OpenSolaris VM.

The bad news is that even though I’ve gone and …

First of all, thanks to everyone who commented on my previous OpenSolaris entry (which wasn’t really positive at all).

I recently tried again - this time starting with an ISO of build 93. I’d recommend completely ignoring the 2008.05 release and going straight for the build 93 image.

Installed easily in VirtualBox, adding the VirtualBox extensions was easy. Select “Devices -> Install Guest Additions” in the VirtualBox menu, then when logged into the OpenSolaris install, do the following:

su

pkgadd -d /media/VBOXADDITIONS_1.6.0_30421/VBoxSolarisAdditions.pkg

(you then say yes, i really do want to install it. rather obvious. I had to do this step again after the “pkg image-update” below though). Just logging out and then back in again gets you all the awesomeness you’d expect from running other guests (such as that system released by a large corporation in Redmond).

The “pkg …

One of the interesting things about conferences is the fact that there are usually parties associated with the conference. This usually means free food and drink. Sometimes, it usually means free t-shirts[1].

Anyway, its a great way to mingle and network, share and learn new things. So come to the OpenSolaris-MySQL-Zend OSCON Bash located at the DoubleTree Hotel (Lloyd Centre), on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 from 8pm-midnight.

Jesse Silver (excellent party planner - I found his skills amazing at the OpenSolaris Developer Summit earlier this year, in Santa Cruz, back in May), has assured us that it will be “carnivalesque”. Boxing, tricycle races, shooting galleries, pool, and an open bar :)

[1] - Good, since I’ve had to visit Target to buy some yesterday - thanks to United’s great efforts of …