Sun has added more than 100 third-party systems and components to the Hardware Compatibility List for Solaris on x86-based processors. A hardware certification test suite has also been released.

Register to attend the SunNetwork[sm] 2003 conference this September 16-18 in San Francisco and get the Sun[tm] ONE Web Services Platform, Developer Edition software FREE. That’s a $5,000 value. Planned topics include N1, Project Orion, Solaris System Management, and Linux.
For more information, go to http://sun.com/sunnetwork34

Sun has posted screenshots of its “Mad Hatter” linux-based desktop project.

This NEWS.COM article gives details about Sun’s upcoming “Gemini” chip to be released in 2004. The chip will have dual UltraSPARC-II (not III) processor cores and use a 130-nanometer manufacturing process. Initial speeds should be in the 900Mhz to 1.2Ghz range.

Sun has made ISO images of Solaris 9 8/03 edition available for download.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced that Sun has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire CenterRun, Inc., a privately-held company based in Redwood City, California. CenterRun provides software that enables customers to rapidly provision, track and update their networked application services across many network devices in an effort to minimize costs and maximize availability and business advantage.

According to this NEWS.COM article, Sun will be using SuSE Linux as part of its “Mad Hatter” desktop linux initiative later this year.

Sun has joined the Open Source Development Lab as a member. OSDL is the organization that is currently paying Linus Torvalds to work on the Linux kernel full-time.

The Sun V480 server is now shipping with 1.05Ghz UltraSPARC-III processors instead of 900Mhz modules.

The OpenPKG project released version 1.3 of their unique RPM-based cross-platform Unix software packaging facility. OpenPKG 1.3 provides 400 selected packages which include proven versions of popular Unix software like Apache, BIND, GCC, GnuPG, MySQL, OpenSSH, Perl, Postfix, Samba and teTeX — all carefully packaged for easy deployment on the officially supported Unix platforms FreeBSD 4.8 and 5.1, Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 and 3.0, Red Hat Linux 9, SuSE Linux 8.2, and Sun Solaris 8 and 9. Highlights in this version are a fully worked off run-command (RC) facility and the greatly increased package quality due to the rigorous application of fully automated package input checking against programmatically written down style, syntax and semantics constraints.