If you live in or around the Silicon Valley you’ll want to come out tonight for the OpenSolaris Users Group meeting. Darren Moffat will be discussing all things security and we’ll also enjoy a short presentation of Project Looking Glass. If your a Solaris fan you definately don’t want to miss it. You can find more details in Alan DuBoff’s blog. (Alan always makes sure there are goodies to be given away, so come for the swag too.)

For years, Celeste Stokely and Stokely Consulting have provided two of the most-used sites for UNIX administrators and users everywhere, Stokely’s UNIX Serial Port Resources and UNIX Sysadmin Resources.

I’m proud to announce that as of May 30th, 2005, I’ve taken over hosting and maintenance of these two sites, and you can now find them here:
SunHELP UNIX Serial Port Resources and SunHELP UNIX Sysadmin Resources.

I’d like to thank Celeste for giving me the chance to continue providing these resources to the UNIX system administrator and user community.

ZDNet UK has a great link to an MP3 of some Sun Germany employees and their version of a corporate anthem, “The Power Of Sun”. If nothing else, it’s a really good musical cover of “Power of Love” by Huey Lewis and the News.

PostgreSQL 8.0.3 is a highly scalable, SQL compliant, open source object-relational database management system. With more than 15 years of development history, it is quickly becoming the de facto database for enterprise level open source solutions.

Mark Round has been a key member of the Blastwave Open Source Software Project since May of 2003. During these two years he has proven to be an ideal package maintainer that delivers quality software ready to run on Solaris x86 and Sparc. His work with PostgreSQL ensures that Solaris users worldwide have easy access to world class database services for free.

Ensure that you see the online book “Practical PostgreSQL” by John Worsley. Also, the “PostgreSQL 8.0.3 Documentation” is available online. It includes a Tutorial that will help you get started with this powerful database.

One of the upcoming changes to Solaris x86 is the replacement of the current bootloader with the GNU GRUB bootloader. Robert Milkowski, a fellow OpenSolaris Pilot Program participant, has bootstrapped an OpenSolaris Build 14 system and provides screenshots of the new boot process.

The next Solaris Express build is expected to include the new bootloader.

Olivier Fourdan is the creator of Xfce which he describes like so :

“Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for various *NIX systems. Designed for productivity, it loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources.”

Please see the release at Blastwave.

From GCC Package maintainer Peter Felecan :

The first release of the new GNU Compiler Collection is available.

This is the branch 4 of the GNU compiler suite. The branch 4 is
new. My recommendation is to not use it in a production
environment. If you wish to use a stable and well tested version of
the GNU compiler suite you can use the branch 3; for this, look for
the gcc3 related packages. There is also the branch 2 which is still
used and sometimes preferred for some products. If you are in this
situation look for the gcc2 related packages.

See the complete announcement from Peter Felecan.

Sun is acquiring Tarantella, Inc. Tarantella was formerly known as the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) before selling its operating system assets to Caldera Systems, Inc. in 2001. Sun will acquire Tarantella for a cash purchase price of $0.90 per share, or approximately $25 million in the aggregate, and assumption of employee stock options.

The Santa Cruz Operation was founded in 1979. In 1984, it introduced SCO XENIX, which ran on the Apple Lisa, PC XT and the DEC Pro 350. In 1995, SCO purchased UnixWare and all the AT&T source code for Unix System V from Novell. The UnixWare and OpenServer product lines were merged into a single SCO UnixWare 7 product in 1998.

This NEWS.COM article has details on Sun’s plans to double the staff at its Indian engineering facilities to 2,000 people over the next two to three years. Engineering facilities in Russia, China, and the Czech Republic will also be expanded, while growth at its United States facilities will be held back.

According to this NEWS.COM article, Sun’s most recent quarterly loss was $6 million narrower than earlier reported, according to a quarterly report filed with regulators.

Sun today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase all intellectual property rights of Procom Technology, Inc. relating to Procom’s Network Attached Storage (NAS) offerings in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $50M. This InternetNews article has more information.

Acclinet Corporation, a reseller of IT equipment, is looking to donate a pair of loaded SunFire 3800 systems to a qualifying non-profit organization. See here for more details.

A Slashdot article today discusses the “OpenSolaris is vaporware” argument. Not so – OPENSOLARIS EXISTS. Rome wasn’t built in a day – and Sun’s engineers, along with the OpenSolaris Pilot Program (of which I am a member) are working to make sure that the general public release is “done right”.

Don’t beleive me? Just ask Ben, Dennis, or look at the build that I did this morning.

I don’t know how I missed it or when it went live, but www.sun.com has been redesigned. I much, much prefer the new look – no more garish red/yellow/blue!