Open source software, releases, and projects headline this week's edition:
OpenSPARC T2 RTL processor design has been released to the open source community [19131]
Learn more about the newly released NetBeans 6.0's latest features through a series of screencasts [19093], a techtalk [19134], and it being named the recommended replacement product for the retiring Sun Java Studio developer tools [19137].
Sun HPC ClusterTools 7.1 are available as a free download [19097]
Learn how to install and use CMT developer tools for Sun Studio 12 in a new webcast [19060]
OpenOffice.org 2.3 users are urge to upgrade to 2.3.1 due to security vulnerability [19106]
The new OpenEco.org community offers free, easy-to-use energy performance tools and shares best practices to reduce GHG emissions [19105]
Sun Cluster Geographic Edition [19112] and A Point of Control (APOC) [19098] have been open sourced
OpenSolaris now has the new-boot SPARC putback [19123] and aMSN messenger clone [19046]
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Earn your certification through Sun eLearning Certification Success Packages and receive a free gift -- a Swiss Army Field Watch or a Solio Universal Hybrid Charger. Training is available for system administrators and developers.
Sun Java Studio Enterprise and Sun Java Studio Creator developer tools will be retired and Sun is encouraging users to migrate to NetBeans 6.0. No definitive dates have been set for the end of life for these developer tools, although migration programs are in place to help users with the eventual move.
Editors of Supercomputing Online named the Sun Constellation System as one of its Products of the Year for 2007. This Editors' Choice Award looks for technologies that represent outstanding innovation in design, value, and performance as well as ones that change the competitive landscape of the market, whether through innovative features, exceptional value for the price/performance, remarkable ease of use, or a demonstrable boost to users' productivity.
OpenOffice.org is urging users of version 2.3 to download version 2.3.1 due to a security vulnerability in the prior release that could allow attackers to execute arbitrary static Java code when a user opens specially crafted database documents.
OpenEco.org, jointly sponsored by Sun and Natural Logic, is a global on-line community that provides free, easy-to-use tools to help participants assess, track, and compare energy performance, share proven best practices to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and encourage sustainable innovation.
Governments in Japan, Singapore, and Norway have selected Sun to create open, Web 2.0 architectures in order to provide better online government services to its constituents.
SNI Editor-in-Chief/CTO John J. McLaughlin posts items of interest to Sun Users on a
regular basis on the System News for Sun Users blog. A quick recap of John's posts for the last week, include xVM White Paper (Sun Blueprints Online), Presentation Slides and Performance Troubling Shooting with DTrace and cpustat, installing Windows Server 2008 on Sun x64 Servers and a link to Todd Jobson’s blog on Processors and Performance : Chips, MIPS, and Sizing blips
The new-boot SPARC putback has been announced, bringing dboot, ramdisk-based booting and the ramdisk miniroot to SPARC. According to Tim Foster, the importance in this development is that it "paves the way for ZFS Boot on SPARC!"
aMSN, a free, open source MSN Messenger clone, has been ported to Solaris, Colin Zou announced in his blog. aMSN has a web site from which the application, plug-ins and skins can be downloaded. Features can be easily added to aMSN with plug-ins, and its look can be completely changed with different skins.
Sun has teamed up with APC, a leader in integrated critical power and cooling services, to design part of Sun's new energy efficient datacenter in Santa Clara, California. The datacenter, commissioned as part of Sun's Eco Innovation Initiative, features a rack-based datacenter that leverages a flexible, scalable APC InfraStruXure InRow cooling solution that will enable Sun to effectively reduce the cost and environmental impact of maintaining its high density IT systems.
The Red Shift, best known in the field of astronomy as the measure of an expanding universe, has been adopted by Sun as a measure of growth in IT. Mike Douglas, Sun VP for global field marketing, explained, "...growth in IT is less from computing and more from social networking." To accommodate this evolving market, Sun has applied the red shift.
What good is a backup system that doesn't produce a particular file on-demand? Or, more to the point, what can developers do to eliminate this possibility? That's the question Glenn Scott, Sun Labs senior researcher, and his team asked as they launched the Celeste Project. The answer, rather, the solution, turned out to be the Celeste Project.
Concerned about the costs of datacenter power usage, cooling requirements and cabling? Dean Nelson has some answers for you and, as he says, "This is not rocket science." Nelson, director of Global Lab and Datacenter Design Services at Sun, shared his ideas on the subject with Al Riske. Nelson and his team have saved Sun millions and are now doing the same for customers.
According to Victoria Shannon in her International Herald Tribune article "A group approach to teaching teachers," Curriki.org is the "Wikipedia of curriculum" and the brainchild of Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun chairman and co-founder, respectively. But, she writes, how can Curiki avoid the stigma that attaches to Wikipedia, which often posts specious, unvetted entries, since Curriki also solicits contributions from users?
Sun HPC ClusterTools 7.1, an update release based on Open MPI 1.2.4, is now available as a free download. Major new features include Open source MPI (message-passing interface), uDAPL/Infiniband support, improved memory pool usage, simplified system administration tasks, support for the Allinea DDT debugger, and more.
The latest BigAdmin Xperts session focuses on Solaris Patching with community questions being addressed by the named Sun experts Enda O'Connor and Arindam Sarkar. Some of the questions currently posed and answered discuss when to patch servers, suggestions on reducing downtime for patching, and should all patches be installed.
Vice President of Global Systems Engineering Hal Stern talks to Joost Pronk, product manager for virtualization in the Solaris group and Dan Price, staff engineer and lead on the containers project in the Solaris kernel group about the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant in an Innovating@Sun podcast.
With the recent demonstration of OpenSolaris running on IBM's z System mainframe, questions have once again arisen regarding the Sun-IBM agreement. Taking a look back to the August 16th announcement, questions posed then and answered by Sun may satisfy today's inquiring minds.
NetBeans 6.0 TechTalk
NetBeans Technology Evangelist Brian Leonard Discusses IDE's Features
TheServerSide.com is hosting a Techtalk on NetBeans 6.0 with Brian Leonard, Sun senior software engineer and NetBeans technology evangelist. Topics discussed include installers, code editors, integrated profiler, and Ruby language support, among others.
Learn about installing and using the CMT Developer Tools for Sun Studio 12, ATS, BIT, Discover, and SPOT, during a webcast presentation delivered by Darryl Gove in compiler performance engineering at Sun. The presentation is part slideware and part demonstration.
Sun delivered two presentations at VMworld 2007, which are now available online as high-quality MP3s and PDFs. The presentations are Sun Virtual Desktop Solutions in Theory and in Real World Deployments and Proven Virtualization Scalability with VMware Infrastructure 3.
Two video presentations covering a Sun-sponsored panel discussion on privacy in the participatory Web era held December 12th are accessible from the Sun website. The first webcast covers the event "Privacy and the Network of You" and the second recaps key ideas from the panel discussion.
Sun is using "edugaming" to school its new hires about the company, according to Kotaku's West Coast Associate Editor Michael McWhertor, who says the Sun Learning Services program is "worth a look for the in-game music alone."
Each week, we determine which articles have been most frequently referenced by logged-in subscribers to provide you with a list of the most popular articles for the last 4 issues. The top 10 articles for last week, Vol 118 Issue 1, were:
Sun xVM Ops Center to be Released January 8th [19096]
The OpenSPARC T2 RTL (register transfer level) processor design has been released under the GPL 2.0 license and is now available for download from the OpenSPARC.net project site. The OpenSPARC T2 processor is based on the UltraSPARC T2 processor - an eight core, 64-thread processor.
The recent release of NetBeans 6.0 gives users a newly written editor infrastructure, support for Ruby/JRuby/Ruby on Rails, a new Visual Game Designer, updated Data Binding support, integrated Profiling, new productivity features, a simplified installation process, and more. A number of screencasts tours viewers through some of the latest features in the IDE.
The Sun Cluster Geographic Edition has joined the ranks of Sun's open source solutions, reports Nick Solter, HA Clusters community facilitator and Sun Cluster developer, in the Sun Cluster Oasis blog.
APOC, or A Point of Control, is the open source version of the Sun Desktop Manager. It gives users the ability to manage desktops and desktop applications in large scale deployments from a central location, and enables system administrators to deliver securely configured open source desktop environments tuned to the needs and privileges of specific users, roles, groups, or hosts within the organization.
eWeek's Tiffany Maleshefski gave OpenOffice.org 2.3 a try and came away favorably impressed. Her review reports several significant improvements, notably an easier upgrade path for current Microsoft Office users, improved security measures and a variety of features in the word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and database applications.
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