Oracle and SUN Archive

Sun Microsystems and IBM announced partnerships around Sun's Solaris operating system and its Java software on Monday, a sign that Sun is taking a less adversarial approach to relations with its computing industry rivals.

Sun Microsystems has polished off its cheapest and likely most attractive Opteron-based workstation to date. The hardware maker today introduced the world to the Ultra 20 a one-way (one socket) box that starts at $895. That price has to please a lot of Sun customers who complained when the much higher-end W2100z amd W1100z workstations arrived, costing thousands of dollars. With the Ultra 20, Sun is really delivering some of the price/performance benefits associated with x86 chips to the developer crowd.

MadPenguin reviews Xandros Desktop 3 Business Edition, screenshots included.

As with any development project, you need to do a little planning before creating an agent. In particular, you must understand the capabilities of the application in question, and define the scope of the project. This sample chapter will help you get started planning for your new agent.

Sun Microsystems is embarking on a $50 million ad campaign, associating its products and services with some of its prominent customers such as eBay, General Motors, and Major League Baseball. Responding to declining sales and influence in the industry, Sun is revamping its image, down to their packaging, office decor and even on-hold music.

Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy is disparaging a report that suggests an investment firm is planning a leveraged buyout of the server and software company.

Casper Dik, Roy Fielding, Al Hopper, Simon Phipps, and Rich Teer were chosen to be the charter members of the OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board. They will be responsible for the direction of the project and coordinating the efforts of volunteer contributors.

In the latest edition of his series of articles on enterprise class Linux distributions, Tom Adelstein looks at Sun's JDS. As a reader of this series, I found each of the first three stories to represent distributions that were increasingly interesting. JDS has broken the trend. See the article at LinuxJournal here.

From a very personal and revealing interview with ex-Sun executive Danese Cooper: "The prevailing open source wisdom is that Linux is going to win, and anything you do that doesn't directly influence Linux in a positive way is not a good thing. We spoke to Linus Torvalds about this once, the OpenSolaris team, and he expressed interest in the project as a way for him to be able to get the Open Source community around Linux to move to a higher level, you know, to match some of the advantages that are in Solaris. We were talking about a virtuous cycle where Solaris gets better because of the places where Linux is better than Solaris now. Like especially for one and two processor performance, and Linux gets better because of the places where Solaris does better now. The beneficiary is the consumer."

As seen here and being discussed here, Sun has decided to restrict support for:

In this document I will walk you through the process of creating a Debian package for Xandros 3.0. When completed this package will install the Kasablanca FTP client. Read more.

The latest version of Solaris Express has been released, Alan Hargreaves and Torrey McMahon have blogged about some of the new features. Download it from here. More info here.

Sun this week at LinuxWorld revealed its Java Desktop 3.0 enterprise Linux desktop environment. Sun has not yet given a laundry list of features, but has indicated that device support and productivity are the foremost attributes of the upgrade.

Xandros announced the version 3 release of the Open Circulation Edition of its Linux desktop operating system (OS). The new release provides a new Internet experience with Firefox web browsing, Skype Internet calling, and Thunderbird e-mailing. The Xandros Open Circulation Edition is available for download at no charge. Update: A review.