Got a Solaris issue that you can’t solve? Give me a shout via Google Talk, I’m “mrbill@gmail.com”. The standard questions policy still applies.

The brains over at Google have pulled the wraps off Google Talk, a standards-compliant instant messaging client available to anyone with a GMail account.

For non-Windows platforms, configuration information is provided for Jabber-compatible IM clients such as GAIM or Psi that run on Solaris.

Solaris Express 8/2005 is now available.

Sun’s Dan Price posted a summary to his weblog:

Notable New Features in Solaris “Nevada”, Build 19 (08/2005)

Desktop
* The dcam1394(7D) driver is now available on all platforms (formerly it was SPARC only); it implements a subset of the 1394 Trade Association Digital Camera Specification. A sample program which uses a camera will be available in a future build.
* An important improvement to USB support on Solaris has arrived– automatic handling of unknown USB devices by libUSB and the kernel’s USB infrastructure. This means that without any additional configuration, you should be able to plug in a device such as a digital camera, and have gphoto recognize it. In contrast, you previously needed to do manual configuration. [6213551]
* The USB CCID IFD Handler was integrated. This is a userland driver (from the MUSCLE project) for USB CCID-compliant smartcard readers. You can now use a wide variety of USB smartcard readers with Solaris.
* glxinfo & glxgears were added as a followup part of the MESA integration.
* ATI Xorg drivers were updated to June 2005 version
* The i810 driver was updated for i945G & E7221 support. But please note that there were some problems with this integration and the Xorg i810 driver now refuses to load. Intel graphics users may need to switch back to Xsun or copy the i810_drv.so from an older build. [6301351]

Security
* pam.conf(4) picks up a very useful include control flag which should help break up a complex pam configuration into separate files. [6258443]
* Scalability when a large number (thousands) of IPsec policy rules are in place has been substantially improved. [6227733]
* Kerberos’s graphical key management tool gkadmin(1m) picks up the ability to specify the key encryption type.

Hardware Support
* Improved tolerance for USB 2.0 controllers on some VIA chipsets. [6213463]
* Support for Dell PERC 3/Si RAID was added.
* Support for the Dell Precision 670’s SCSI card (Adaptec AIC-7901A with HostRAID) was added.
* MPxIO (I/O multipathing) support for a number of devices from Engenio, SGI, StorageTek and Sun was added.
* The lsimega(7D) driver from LSI was added, providing support for LSI’s new generation of 320-2x RAID cards. Older LSI cards are already supported via the amr(7D) driver.

Other
* find picks up the -mmin (modified n minutes ago), -amin (accessed n minutes ago) and -cmin (status changed n minutes ago) options. [5077247]

Sun has opened the Open Media Commons web site, dedicated to developing royalty-free standards for digital rights management and content protection.

According to this NEWS.COM article, Sun has opened an Open Source office headed by Simon Phipps. Simon has more details on his blog about the position and what everything involves.

General Dynamics has acquired Tadpole Computer, one of the manufacturers of Sun’s Ultra 3 mobile workstation. According to the press release, Tadpole’s sixty employees will become part of General Dyanmics’ C4 Systems business unit.

According to this article by Peter Salus (whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting) at UnixReview, Bell Labs has finally disbanded Department 1127, the group originally responsible for development of the UNIX operating system.

Sun Cluster 3.1 8/05 has been released to customers. So far no official announcement can be found but Sun Cluster customers were informed this afternoon via email of the upgrade. The release notes and documentation are avalible at docs.sun.com.

This release is the one Solaris 10 users have been waiting for, Solaris 10 is supported on both UltraSPARC and AMD64, and support for Zones is included. The new features list includes:

– Improved Cluster Installation and Upgrade Functionality
– Support for Network Appliance Network-Attached Storage (NAS) Devices
– Simplified SunPlex Manager Interface
– Support for Tagged VLAN to Share Network Adapters
– Sun Cluster HA for Solaris Containers (aka: Zones)
– Support for Solaris SMF Services
– Support for the AMD 64–Bit Platform
– Support for Kerberos
– Support for Oracle 10g and Oracle 10g Real Application Clusters on the SPARC Platform and x86 Platform

Customers can download the software from the Online Support Center (OSC).

Today a new community service was launched on the java.sun.com site, called Ask the Experts. It allows you to post questions on a particular topic and get answers from Sun experts on that topic. Questions that you post are collected daily and sent to the experts. The Q&As are then shown in a transcript on the java.sun.com site.

The first Ask the Experts session is on the Java Business Integration Specification. The experts are the spec co-leads, Peter Walker and Ron Ten-Hove. If you have a question about the JBI spec, go to the Ask the Experts page and click on the “Submit your question” link at the bottom of the page. You can submit questions to Peter and Ron through August 17.

According to this press release, Sun will resell VMware ESX Server, VMware GSX Server and VMware Workstation products to customers of their x86-based server and workstation systems.

Six Sun engineers were honored last week with an InfoWorld Innovators award for their work on the Solaris 10 Operating System. The award was presented to Bryan Cantrill, Stephen Hahn, Adam Leventhal, Cynthia McGuire, Andrew Rudoff and Michael Shapiro.