OpenSolaris @ Florida Linux Show

I just came back from a talk at the Florida Linux Show at Jacksonville, Florida (University of North Florida).  Here is a Bio they posted about me.

Because my car was out of order, I called my Account Manager Tim Simmons and he came to my rescue picking me up from my apartment in Gainesville and driving all the way to Jacksonville and back.  It was a nice time to get to know him and his expereince working at SUN.

Also, Martin Brown the Campus Ambassador at FAMU made the trek across the panhandle to the first coast to support me in the talk.

I knew I was going to speak to an audience of linux enthusiast so I decided to speak about Open Solaris and what it has to offer with respect to linux in general.  I made my slides from pieces of Open Solaris slides all over the web.  (I will make my slides available to CAs on http://www.sunambassadors.com/) 

Most people were impressed with the features available in Open Solaris.  The biggest misconception I corrected was the advancement of OpenSolaris's package management system.  Most people don't know that Ian Murdock (the Ian in Debian, the linux distro that introduced packagees) is helping to design Open Solaris.  The biggest wow factor I got was the time slider and the ideas driving ZFS.  If I had more time I would have went more indepth about ZFS and Zones.

I was suprised to see the amout of people who have used the open source music player SongBird.  Also, people seem to prefer VirtualBox as their virtualization tool.

I love giving open solaris talks and impressing people with all the features in the OS.  It is always a bummer to confess to people that it still is not mission ready yet, and they should run it on virtual box first.  I am hoping the 2009.6 version will be much more stable and ready for installation on my machine.

Below are some shots of the sun team that represented at the Florida Linux Show.