Category: Solaris/Unix

Talk at SVCEW

18 Mar
Raju Alluri 0 Comment Solaris/Unix, Technical, Virtualization

[ Backlog post from March 12th]

I visited Sri Vishnu Engineering College for Women on 12th March. This visit is scheduled just 24 hours before my travel and my initial idea was to talk about OpenSolaris and its features. Once the students are assembled, I came to know that about half of them attended a prior talk of mine on overview of OpenSolaris. So I had to switch to an impromptu talk and covered the following:

  • The concept of virtualization: OS virtualization using zones and network virtualization using crossbow.
  • Walk thru of Open Solaris Developer Preview 2 (Project Indiana) using live CD
  • Insight into SMF (Service Management Framework) in OpenSolaris

There are not many questions, but their response to my questions is very good. They know what is “redirection of a unix command to a pipe” and “the ports Sun’s Application Server binds to by default”. Impressive.

Here are some pictures from the day.

SVECWMar2008

I left a copy of Open Solaris Developer Preview at the college for them to try out.After the discussion, I met with the Director of the college, a couple of department heads and other key people. Most of our chat is around how open source can be used in student activities and projects.

Sun Tech Days Day03

01 Mar
Raju Alluri 0 Comment Hyderabad, Other Opensource, Solaris/Unix, Technical, Virtualization

This year’s Day 03 of Sun Tech Days, the community day, is better than last year. Ian Murdock‘s talk is a good curtain raiser for a great day. I initially planned to roam around in all the tracks, but the continuous high activity in OpenSolaris day didn’t let me do that. This year, the attendance is close to a total of 300+ and we had a sustained crowd of 150+ most of the time. Sunay‘s talk on Project Crossbow brought up some very good real life questions from the audience. So did the talks on Cluster technologies and virtualization. The community for sure is catching up here.
We also had a session of HOSUG at the end of the day. At this time, we are inviting memberships to HOSUG. If you are interested, please sign up using the participation instructions here. Help this community grow!

Sun Tech Days Day02

28 Feb
Raju Alluri 3 Comments Java, Other Opensource, Solaris/Unix, Technical, Virtualization

It is fun and technology again. No time to take photos. Shared some ideas, issues, tools and tricks with my OpenSolaris buddies and some of the attendees. More socializing with Sun folks. Interacted with more attendees and suggested hints on the best ways to learn (a) OpenSoalris, (b) Java technologies. There are some in depth discussions on virtualization, types (and the good, bad & ugly) of hypervisor technologies from Sun and others.

Had to shorten my visit today due to other commitments in the evening. Short, yet sweet!

Sun Tech Days Day01

27 Feb
Raju Alluri 1 Comment Other Opensource, Solaris/Unix, Technical

I am at Sun Tech Days-Hyderabad-Day1 today. As usual, this is a mega event with lot of fun and technology. Satish did a short demo of VirtualBox during Rich Green’s keynote. Jairam did a demo of Sun’s virtualization/management technologies and I heard it went well. I spent my entire day around enterprise/Java technology tracks. During breaks I spent some time with my old pals. I could clearly sense increased awareness of OpenSolaris when compared to last year. The overall opensource pitch is helping Sun.


After the event there is a welcome reception in the night. The famous Euphoria band entertained the attendees. I spent about half an hour there before heading home for prior commitments. Overall, it is a fun filled day with tech toppings.

Talk at Osmania University

25 Feb
Raju Alluri 0 Comment Solaris/Unix, Technical

Friday’s talk at Osmania University is well received. The attendees number about 70. I had some issues with my laptop and the projector, so couldn’t do a hands-on session of OpenSolaris.

After the talk, there is some discussion about leads to learning shell scripting and related areas. Here you can find some material for starting with any Unix variant.

VirtualBox: A first look

19 Feb
Raju Alluri 0 Comment Solaris/Unix, Technical, Virtualization

I installed a CentOS5 guest on OpenSolaris desktop using VirtualBox and played with it a bit. The installation process is smooth. The hard disk and partitions are hidden well by VirtualBox from anaconda, thus making the entire installation process very simple. Even the network configuration, display card configuration, etc. are very simple and straight forward.

I had a crash of the OS and the virtualbox while playing with several tools on CentOS, but could not reproduce it again. Well, it sounds okay for a beta-1 build. Tools like browsers, network monitoring tools etc. worked very fine on the guest OS. I may look around for Windows and other OS DVDs. That would overload the host OS and helps me see the performance impact.

screenshot

I liked the way mouse capture and keyboard capture are toggled. Overall, it is impressive.