Today, July 30th, is System Administrator Appreciation Day. Show your appreciation by taking your system administrator out to lunch, or buying them a small gift.

Solaris 9 release 9/04 is now available for download.

Examining the J2EE Policy Agent and Installing It on Oracle Application Server 10g. Learn the components and capabilities of the J2EE Policy Agent, which protects hosted applications, platform free. This paper also shows you how to install and configure the Policy Agent on Oracle Application Server 10g.

Check it out here: http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/identserver/reference/techart/j2eepolicyagent.html

Sun has formally announced three new Opteron-based machines running Solaris X86, the “Sun Java Workstations” W1100z and W2100z, and the V40z four-way rackmount server.

According to this NEWS.COM article, Sun will be announcing a four-way Opteron server named the “V40z” on Monday the 26th.

The OpenPKG project released version 2.1 of their RPM-based cross-platform Unix software packaging facility.

OpenPKG 2.1 consists of 495 selected (from a pool of 770) packages which include latest versions of popular Unix software like Apache, Bash, BIND, GCC, INN, Mozilla, MySQL, OpenSSH, Perl, Postfix, PostgreSQL, Samba, Squid, teTeX and Vim — all carefully packaged for easy deployment on 21 different Unix platforms, including FreeBSD 4.10/5.2, Debian GNU/Linux 3.0/3.1, Red Hat Linux 9, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, Fedora Core 2, SuSE Linux 9.0/9.1, and Sun Solaris 2.6/8/9/10.

this NEWS.COM article details how Sun is considering expanding Solaris to run on Intel’s Itanium and IBM’s POWER processor families.

“We’ve begun looking at Solaris on Power as well as Solaris on Itanium as a way of delivering incremental volume,” said Jonathan Schwartz, appointed chief operating officer in April. Sun believes that distributing as high a volume of its technology as possible will mean the company will be able to recruit software partners more easily and have a bigger foundation for future sales of upgrades, services and software.

Surely I can’t be the only person who remembers (and has a copy of) Solaris 2.5.1 for PowerPC?

Sun Microsystems, Inc. reported preliminary results today for its fiscal fourth quarter and full fiscal year, which ended June 30, 2004.

Revenues for the fourth quarter grew to $3.110 billion, an increase of 4.3 percent as compared with $2.982 billion for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2003. Net income for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2004 was $795 million or $0.24 per share as compared with a net loss of $1.039 billion or a net loss of $0.32 per share for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2003.

Cash generated from operating activities was $2.172 billion for the quarter, and the balance of cash and marketable securities was $7.608 billion.

According to this Register article, engineers at Sun have finally gotten a fully-64-bit Solaris x86 kernel running on Opteron processors.

In this 55 minute Flash presentation, James Gosling, father of Java technology, discusses the state of the Java platform, his new role as Sun Developer Tools CTO, and Java technology vs .NET.

Check it out: http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/javatools/jsenterprise/reference/presentations/jgosling/mwclassframe.html

Solaris Express 7/04, aka Beta5, aka Build 60, is out! In the previous post the big ticket features were listed, but thanks to SunBlogs we can see some neat features no listed in the whats new. Amoung the favorites would be a new truss option to show how long each syscall takes (-E), inclusion of the BitStream Vera fonts, USB End-User support enhansments, fixes to the “remaining” Mozilla install bugs, several exciting new functions for DTrace, and don’t forget about the resource management goodies! Run, don’t walk, for the ISO’s now. And in case you missed last months release, don’t forget that CD0 (the worthless Webstart installer disk) is gone, you now must download all 3 iso’s.

Solaris 10 Beta 5 is due out today. True to form the docs have been up for a couple days. First and foremost, ZFS and the Service Manager still aren’t in for those of you waiting. For the rest of us, we get some awsome Zones updates, namely an answered request for zoneadm CLI history, disk-based file system support added was to zonecfg, zones extensions have been added to ps, and a massive amount of work has been done on zones resource management. Also added is new locales, Java support for Pstack, and the new functions ddi_strtol(9F) and ddi_strtoul(9F) for string conversion to longs (str to l) and unsigned longs (str to ul). Other goodies and improvements went in as well, so prime your ABEs and get ready for the ISOs hopefully some time in the next couple hours.

It appear that earlier this week a new story slipped out from theregister.co.uk that wasn’t reported anywhere, BluePrints will apparently stay. Sun only plans to lay off the experts who write them. Oh goody. Still no word on the list of names, particularly John Howard. Hopefully we here at SunHelp.org can get some details on the individuals and report the results, but no one is talking.

This article spotlights the capabilities of Sun’s server integration module for NetBeans. The module, a hidden component of the installation bundle that contains Application Server PE 8 and NetBeans 3.6, integrates Application Server PE 8 into the NetBeans environment for developing Web applications.

Read about it here: http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/appserver/reference/techart/as_nb.html

A group of Open Source Software developers today announced the launch of JDShelp.org, a Web site providing support and documentation for the JavaTM Desktop System (“JDS”), a complete GNU/Linux distribution for the enterprise from Sun Microsystems, Inc. The JDShelp.org Web site features downloads of software applications compiled specifically for JDS; and it also contains howtos, tutorials, links, and resources dedicated to the GNU/Linux desktop.

Explains Tom Adelstein, a Linux consultant, “The JDShelp.org site exists to help users who have found JDS as an alternative to Microsoft Windows and other operating systems. Many were first exposed to open-source software from using the OpenOffice.org productivity suite and/or the Mozilla and Firefox browsers. Then, they realized that Linux was next in their migration path. Whatever the reason, they’re coming over to Sun and Linux.”