SunHELP News

Sun Spotted in the Tron Legacy Trailer

Bill Bradford — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:13:27 +0000

A number of people have emailed me about a “sort-of” Sun spotting in the new Tron Legacy Trailer.

A computer console shows a system type of

SolarOS 4.0.1 Generic_50203-A2 Sun4m i386 Unknown.Unknown

Click the image for a full-sized 1080p screen capture.

UNIX Serial Port Resources Updated

Bill Bradford — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:04:33 +0000

Martha Starkey was kind enough to send in some updates for the Sun PPP resources page.

Oracle’s plans for OpenSolaris

Bill Bradford — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 05:27:32 +0000

Peter Tribble has some notes from the OpenSolaris Annual Meeting.

Oracle will continue to make OpenSolaris available as open source, and Oracle will continue to actively support and participate in the community.

Oracle will also continue to deliver OpenSolaris releases, including the upcoming OpenSolaris 2010.03 release.

Oracle is investing more in Solaris than Sun did prior to the acquisition, and will continue to contribute technologies to OpenSolaris, as Oracle already does for many other open source projects.

Now mirroring the Sun-1 Archive

Bill Bradford — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 02:36:33 +0000

SunHELP is now proud to host a mirror of Eric Rucker’s Sun-1 Archive: “Documents, images, and files published by Stanford University, VLSI Systems, and Sun Microsystems relating to the Sun-1 workstation and predecessor designs.”

Stories of the “Good Old Days”

Bill Bradford — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:45:15 +0000

Nancy Hauge has a collection of great stories about the early days of Sun Microsystems up at her blog, Consulting Adult.

New site going up for orphaned Sun projects

Bill Bradford — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:24:16 +0000

Thanks to Izumo S. for sending in this item.

A new website devoted to Sun Labs projects being jettisoned by Oracle (or soon-to-be-jettisoned) and their users and researchers will start up this weekend. “Red Giant Phase” is now accepting members (free) and has groups for Project Wonderland, SunSPOT, Darkstar, DReaM, and others.

Discussions about where these projects and their code will go in the future, blogs, and even a *mild defense of Jonathan Schwartz* are on the site.

You can join Red Giant Phase by going to http://sunorphans.ning.com

Sun CEO Tweets his resignation

Bill Bradford — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:07:30 +0000

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has twittered his resignation.

“Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku.
Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more”

Oracle completes Sun acquisition

Bill Bradford — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:48:38 +0000

Oracle announced yesterday that it has completed the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Tadpole/RDI Documentation Archive Created

Bill Bradford — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:27:48 +0000

I’ve started collecting documentation for Tadpole and RDI portable systems and putting it up at http://www.sunhelp.org/tadpole.

If you have any documentation for Tadpole or RDI systems in an online format, please get in touch with me so that I can add it to the archive.

Commentary on the Oracle/Sun “Merger”

Bill Bradford — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:21:57 +0000

From Jim Gosling’s weblog:

Oracle / Sun Strategy Webcast, EU approves takeover purchase

Bill Bradford — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:19:23 +0000

Oracle will be holding a webcast detailing its plans for Sun on Wednesday, January 27 starting at 9am PT.

“Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, along with executives from Oracle and Sun, will outline the strategy for the combined companies, product roadmaps, and how customers will benefit from having all components – hardware, operating system, database, middleware, and applications – engineered to work together.”

In related news, the European Commission has unconditionally approved Oracle’s purchase of Sun.

Ten Reasons why Sun is Still Relevant

Bill Bradford — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:23:40 +0000

eWeek has published this slideshow with “10 Reasons Why Sun is Still Relevant (and one reason why not)”.

SPARC Enterprise 3000 gets a speed-bump

Bill Bradford — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:22:38 +0000

As described in this press release, the SPARC Enterprise 3000 is now available with the 2.76Ghz SPARC64-VII quad-core processor.

VirtualBox Updated

Bill Bradford — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:36:56 +0000

Sun has released a new version of VirtualBox, its free desktop virtualization software.

“VirtualBox 3.1 introduces the virtualization industry’s first “Teleportation” capability, allowing running virtual machines to be moved, uninterrupted between disparate hosts – including those on different operating systems, different classes of computer (e.g. server to client) and even different CPUs (e.g. Intel to AMD).”

Sun’s “Project Peter”

Bill Bradford — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:23:17 +0000

WikiLeaks has published some details about a “Project Peter” that was at one time in development at Sun to facilitate migrations from Oracle to MySQL for some customers.