A number of people have emailed me about a “sort-of” Sun spotting in the new Tron Legacy Trailer.

A computer console shows a system type of

SolarOS 4.0.1 Generic_50203-A2 Sun4m i386 Unknown.Unknown

Click the image for a full-sized 1080p screen capture.

Martha Starkey was kind enough to send in some updates for the Sun PPP resources page.

Peter Tribble has some notes from the OpenSolaris Annual Meeting.

Oracle will continue to make OpenSolaris available as open source, and Oracle will continue to actively support and participate in the community.

Oracle will also continue to deliver OpenSolaris releases, including the upcoming OpenSolaris 2010.03 release.

Oracle is investing more in Solaris than Sun did prior to the acquisition, and will continue to contribute technologies to OpenSolaris, as Oracle already does for many other open source projects.

SunHELP is now proud to host a mirror of Eric Rucker’s Sun-1 Archive: “Documents, images, and files published by Stanford University, VLSI Systems, and Sun Microsystems relating to the Sun-1 workstation and predecessor designs.”

Nancy Hauge has a collection of great stories about the early days of Sun Microsystems up at her blog, Consulting Adult.

Thanks to Izumo S. for sending in this item.

A new website devoted to Sun Labs projects being jettisoned by Oracle (or soon-to-be-jettisoned) and their users and researchers will start up this weekend. “Red Giant Phase” is now accepting members (free) and has groups for Project Wonderland, SunSPOT, Darkstar, DReaM, and others.

Discussions about where these projects and their code will go in the future, blogs, and even a *mild defense of Jonathan Schwartz* are on the site.

You can join Red Giant Phase by going to http://sunorphans.ning.com

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has twittered his resignation.

“Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku.
Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more”

Oracle announced yesterday that it has completed the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

I’ve started collecting documentation for Tadpole and RDI portable systems and putting it up at http://www.sunhelp.org/tadpole.

If you have any documentation for Tadpole or RDI systems in an online format, please get in touch with me so that I can add it to the archive.

From Jim Gosling’s weblog:

Oracle will be holding a webcast detailing its plans for Sun on Wednesday, January 27 starting at 9am PT.

“Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, along with executives from Oracle and Sun, will outline the strategy for the combined companies, product roadmaps, and how customers will benefit from having all components – hardware, operating system, database, middleware, and applications – engineered to work together.”

In related news, the European Commission has unconditionally approved Oracle’s purchase of Sun.

eWeek has published this slideshow with “10 Reasons Why Sun is Still Relevant (and one reason why not)”.

As described in this press release, the SPARC Enterprise 3000 is now available with the 2.76Ghz SPARC64-VII quad-core processor.

Sun has released a new version of VirtualBox, its free desktop virtualization software.

“VirtualBox 3.1 introduces the virtualization industry’s first “Teleportation” capability, allowing running virtual machines to be moved, uninterrupted between disparate hosts – including those on different operating systems, different classes of computer (e.g. server to client) and even different CPUs (e.g. Intel to AMD).”

WikiLeaks has published some details about a “Project Peter” that was at one time in development at Sun to facilitate migrations from Oracle to MySQL for some customers.