OpenSolaris at the Ontario Linux Fest 2009

Today I attended the Ontario [GNU] Linux Fest here in Toronto. To my delight there was a session on OpenSolaris led by Steven Acres, the founder of the new Toronto OpenSolaris Users Group (SUG). I heard about the new SUG earlier this week and joined the mailing list. After his presentation, I spoke with Steven about the new SUG. He says it has very few members at this stage and is seeking additional leadership. The meetings are held at the Bahen Centre for Computer Science (University of Toronto.) When finished, some head out for food and drinks. This sounds like a great way to meet and get to know fellow geeks. I thought the Toronto Java Users Group was going be good for that, but it doesn't seem very social to me. Everyone shows up, listens to a vendor presentation, then leaves.

I think Steven's presentation was prepared earlier by Sun. It was full of command line examples but light on explaining the meat of what makes Solaris a compelling alternative to other operating systems. Maybe each slide was designed as a visual cue for the presenter to go into the kind of detail I was expecting. This session did have the best swag though: a thick book on ZFS Administration!! Thank you Sun!

This session got me thinking about a blog series I've been wanting to write for more than a year about OpenSolaris. Each entry was going to focus on a particular technology such as SMF, Resource Manager, Zones, etc. I haven't written the series yet because I'd have to do a bunch more research about each technology, and just haven't had the time. I'm a Java developer using OpenSolaris, not a network administrator who gets hands on experience with the full stack every day. Maybe once I meet some of the SUG members we can work together on creaing such a blog series to be posted on The Observatory, then turn it into a new PowerPoint presentation that will be more persuasive.