Open Solaris finally released some code yesterday. They mailed out an announcement about the code drop and within a few minutes, the 1000 free t-shirts on offer to the initial visitors had been nabbed. I managed to get one, but by the time the site actually got slashdotted they’d all gone. I hope that Open Solaris turns out to be more than just a fun t-shirt tag line and more of a cool project that’s worth getting involved with. To that end, I’ll be dissecting the Solaris kernel over the next month and will get together a Kernel Hacking column with some more details on the project – I’m excited, since I’ve got the Solaris Internals book but could never convince Sun to hand over a copy of the source for my educational enlightenment (or persuade the authors of the aforementioned book to return my emails on the subject). Looks like blogs.sun.com has been Swartzitised (hyped up pending a forthcoming Sun announcement) but the Sun home page was a little slow off the mark. Maybe I can finally see what lianep and co were on about.
Apple have trademarked the term “Mactel”, presumably because they know we’re going to start using that and they want to stop people from taking the piss out of their decision to switch PowerPC for Pentium. That’s ok, I prefer the terms “AppleDell” or “MacDell” anyway, since it (to me) more adequately explains what will happen. This is especially true once they get someone like Transgaming to license their wine tech and support native Microsoft Windows emulation on Intel based Macs. Yes, I can see that coming. Want to run super dooper fightgame 2005? Just pop it into your Mac and go. It’s a brave new world we’re heading towards – and, as I said, probably time to start thinking about one final Powerbook before they do go the way I may have just predicted.
Big Blue just announced a Free OpenFirmware implementation for PowerPC. I should get onto that – it might finally make the OF embedded device tree stuff actually a reality. I recently added the gmane RSS feed of the LKML to my planet and have since found I am a little more able to track some of the threads taking place on the list. Of course LWN helps out too. Finally started reading Linux Device Drivers 3 with an interest – I like. Thanks guys. Oh, and I’ll be a little busy for around 8 months from August but I think it’ll be worth it. Lots of calls to India, New York and California over the past few days.
No mention of my new camera yet. Meh.
Jon.