Sun is acquring SeeBeyond in a $387 million cash deal.

Sun has released the Ultra 3 mobile workstations. Based on machines currently produced by Tadpole and Naturetech, processors range from 550Mhz UltraSPARC 2i to a 1.28Ghz UltraSPARC 3i, with 15-inch or 17-inch widescreen displays.

I’m in the process of reviewing the Naturetech Meso999 portable workstation (Sold by Sun as the Ultra3), and have some pictures available.

According to this NEWS.COM article, Sun will be de-emphasizing its Linux-based Java Destkop System distribution, concentrating instead on the JDS environment running on top of Solaris.

IBM and Sun today announced a 10-year extension to their Java technology agreement, designed to provide long-term stability to the almost 4.5 million developers in the worldwide Java community. The two companies also announced plans to deliver IBM middleware support for Solaris 10 on SPARC(R), x86 and x64 systems.

Announced today at the 10th annual JavaOne Developer Conference, Sun is releasing source code for the Java System Application Server Platform Edition 9.0 and Java System Enterprise Server Bus .

Sun is sharing the source code for the Java System Application Server Platform Edition 9.0 as well as the Java System Enterprise Server Bus (Java ESB), under the OSI-approved CDDL license that is also being used for Sun’s OpenSolaris project.

Sun has released the Ultra 20 AMD Opteron-based workstation, with prices from $895 to $2695. They’re also offering one free with the purchase of a three-year Sun services subscription at $29.95/month.

SunHELP contributor Ben Rockwood has posted a very nice guide to using Flash archives for backing up development systems to prevent the “brick” syndrome.

The Hungarian UNIX Portal has a huge collection of screenshots detailing the installation of Solaris Express Community Edition and subsequent build of OpenSolaris.

The OpenPKG Foundation has released version 2.4 of their cross-platform software packaging facility.

OpenPKG 2.4 is available for 16 different Unix platforms. Most notably, it is supported on FreeBSD 5.4, NetBSD 2.0.2, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1, Fedora Core 3, SUSE Linux 9.3, and Sun Solaris 9 and 10. Additionally, all CORE and the vast majority of BASE class packages are already available for the tentative platforms FreeBSD 6.0, Gentoo Linux 1.6.12 and Mandriva Linux 10.2. It is also still available for the obsolete platforms Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, Sun Solaris 8 and FreeBSD 4.11. Finally, OpenPKG is also known to work under IBM AIX 5.1, HP HP-UX 11.11 and MacOS X 10.3.

Beating everyone to the punch Joerg Schilling and team have released Schillix, the first ever OpenSolaris Distro! Joerg has worked non-stop on this for more than 2 weeks and the results are amazing. Grab it and earn the right to say you were there.

this NEWS.COM article details Sun’s downplaying its upcoming “Janus” linux compatibility layer for Solaris 10, and increasing support (including hardware donations) of the Xen hypervisor project.

Australian Personal Computer Magazine‘s cover DVD for July features the full version of Solaris 10 for x86 platforms as well as StarOffice 7.1.

IBM has released their SLOF, SlimLine OpenFirmware, under an open source license.

This is an implementation of IEEE-1275 Standard for Boot (Initialization Configuration) Firmware, commonly referred to as “OpenFirmware” or “OpenBoot”, used in Power Macintosh and Sun SPARC-based systems.

From an Open Group mailing list post:

We are delighted to announce that Sun Microsystems has registered Solaris 10 on their SPARC and X86 platforms as conforming to the UNIX 03 Product Standard.

* Solaris 10 Operating System – on 32-bit & 64-bit SPARC based systems
* Solaris 10 Operating System – on 32-bit X86 based systems
* Solaris 10 Operating System – on 64-bit X86 based systems

The Conformance Statements will be available in the next few days at http://www.opengroup.org/csq/
For more information on UNIX 03, please refer to http://www.unix.org/unix03.html
For the latest official list of UNIX registered products, please refer to http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

As a member of the OpenSolaris pilot team for the past six months, I’m proud to announce that OpenSolaris is now available. I’ve created the SunHELP OpenSolaris Page as a central point for information, downloads, links, and informational resources. If you want to get your hands on the code as soon as possible, check out the Source Browser, Downloads via the SDLC, or Downloads via BitTorrent.

Jim Grisanzio has a great weblog entry about what the OpenSolaris Pilot Program consisted of, and how it evolved over the past year to what you see today.