There were plenty of Pizzas, Sweet Cakes, Goodies, Giveaways, a stimulating quiz and a lot of fun at JIIT's Open Air Theatre on November 8th 2008 to celebrate being the first Sun Open Source University Meetup (OSUM) in the world to have 100 members, and the birthdays of JIIT Sun Club (now known as JIIT OSUM) as well as NetBeans.

JIIT Sun Club's Birthday Cake	Netbeans Birthday Cake ('Net' licked off)

Attendance for the JIIT OSUM Pizza Party was more than 80 people. It's the first time in life I saw 88 pizzas get eaten up in around 15 minutes. To engage people in stimulating activity along with the celebrations, after the pizza distribution was over, we conducted a fun event called Spoof & Goof (which we started doing at Software Freedom Day). Participants were given clues for a technical term which they had to enact. The guesser and actor, both rewarded with pens, keychains and DVD's from Sun. After that we conducted a tech quiz. We made the contestants sit around in a circle. 7 teams of 4-5 people each contested in the quiz. Questions were not too technical and we tried to ask things which students ought to know or would have learned in college as well. The team consisting of Vipul, Vivek, Arpit from 3rd year and a 2nd year student Shalabh won the quiz. These lucky winners got 1 NetBeans World Tour T-shirt each.

As soon as the activities got over, everybody came together at the center for the cake-cutting ceremony. We had got 2 cakes to cut, one for celebrating Netbeans' 10th anniversay and the first one for JIIT Sun Club itself. Everyone actually sung the happy birthday song when I cut the cake (which I never expected) :). The atmosphere was very casual and informal and people enjoyed the activities along with eating pizzas, cake and winning prizes. At the end we distributed OpenSolaris Student Packs and other leftover goodies from SFD.

Click here to get the photos	Video

Congratulations once again. Let's keep growing JIIT OSUM.

The spirit of the Software Freedom Day was truly alive the 20th and
21st of this September at the Jaypee Institute of Information
Technology University. As planned by the JIIT Sun Club (the now JIIT
OSUM), we devoted an entire weekend rather than a just celebrating SFD
on a day, to celebrate the virtues of free/open-source software, and
also to encourage its use, for the benefit of our students. The
celebration spanned 7 events in totality, which included 2 talks, 2
hands-on-labs, 1 install fest and 1 mega competition.

The team worked hard planning for this event. We had many length
discussions and regular brainstorming sessions for getting ideas for
events. All planning was done systematically, in a streamlined manner
with regular meetings of the team. As soon as we got permissions for
hosting the event, posters were put up all around the campus to promote
it, and these too were designed by the team. We already have Solaris
ready and working on 120 systems in our lab, but since the 2 hands-on
labs focussed on Netbeans completely, we decided to install its latest
update - NetBeans IDE 6.5 Beta along with the Wireless Toolkit in one
of our computer labs. Check out the photos snapped during the
installation (kind of behind-the-scenes of our SFD preps).

Our initial plan was to have a talk on FOSS right upfront at the
beginning of our SFD celebrations, but we got a big surprise with the
arrival of special guests to our campus, and there was sudden change of
plan actioned one day before the event, a change for the good. Our
first guest was Siddharth Batra, who is an alumni of JIIT, now studying
at Stanford University. Our second guest was Priyank Singh, who is also
an alumni of JIIT and now works at Marvell Semiconductors, Inc. Both of
them are undoubtedly the best students JIIT has ever produced till
date, and till they were in college, they caused a lot of improvement
and change, and did a lot for their juniors, for the CSE/IT department
and in turn for the university. We were honored to have them inaugurate
our SFD celebrations by speaking a few words as a kind of birds of a
feather session with the juniors who'll be attending the event.

Day 1

And so, the celebrations of Software Freedom Day at JIIT began in full
swing the saturday afternoon with a warm welcome from me, the host for
the day, who first thanked everyone for participating in this wonderful
occasion, talked about the meaning of SFD and why it is celebrated,
showed a map of all of communities who are conducting similar events in
500 different parts of the world. He then played a video interview of
Stephen Fry speaking about his thoughts on open source and its essence.
The video was shot at GNU's 10th birthday, and as such the video ended
with Stephen blowing out the candles on the GNU's birthday cake. Then I
introduced our honorable guests, Sid sir and Priyank sir (as we like to
call them), invited them on stage to speak about their learning and
experiences gained during their journey in the world of computer
science, programming and research. Sid sir delivered a very
motivational speech to the students, speaking in utmost modesty as he
explained how he evolved.

Priyank sir spoke about the necessity of the willingness to learn. He
has been working on the OLPC project as a part of his company's work
and as such also spoke in brief about various open source softwares he
had used and their importance and utility. Student strength of around
60 had attended the talk. They were encouraged to come up with any
questions for the guests during the two hour event, as it was like a
BOF. Some students raised very interesting questions like why CSE/IT
students need to study electronics subjects, etc. Following the BOF
with Sid/Priyank sir, I moved on with the opening ceremony's agenda. He
first talked about the relaunch of JIIT Sun Club as 'JIIT OSUM' and
what OSUM really means. He also showed the new OSUM community website
and got the students really excited. The new JIIT OSUM logo was also
unvieled, along with the JIIT OSUM site. Then, previous years'
coordinators of JIIT Sun Club Alumni were invited on the stage to share
their experiences. Varun Nischal and Saurabh Dhupar talked about how
they've felt working for JIIT Sun Club and about their thoughts about
its future. The new JIIT OSUM team was then introduced and called on
stage to discuss their plans for this year.

The inaugural event was followed by a much enjoyed, convivial round of
'Spoof & Goof', our technical dumbcharades event. This event drew
its basic idea from the traditional dumb charades, adding on a bit of
technical spice to it. Participants were selected at random from
audience and they were given clues any open source technology. First
the participant had to guess the technology from the clue and then
convey the same either by enacting or drawing it in such a way that the
audience got a clear picture of it. The participants as well as the
first to answer from the audience were awarded with prizes which
included pens, key chains, and open source software DVD's and many more
give away surprises. Unfortunately our SFD goodies hadn't arrived in
time for the event so we noted down the name of the winners. The
participants were completely involved and excited to come on the stage
to act and ofcourse to win exciting goodies ;). By means of this fun
game, participants got to know more about the open source technologies
and alternatives to various softwares. This fun-filled one hour brought
a new life to the celebrations.

Nowadays most new mobile phones are able to run downloadable
applications, not just the ones preinstalled on the device by the
manufacturer. Following Spoof & Goof, we had our hands on workshop
on developing Java ME applications using Netbeans aka 'jMobileZone'
which marked the end of first day celebrations of SFD. The session
included development of a SMS sending project in NetBeans IDE 6.5 beta.
Each and every participant followed him step by step to make the
application on their own system. The event lasted for 2 hours and was
taken by me. It was the most sought after event and was attended by
about 45 inquisitive participants. The session clearly brought out the
message that development of mobile application in Java followed by its
deployment onto a Java enabled mobile is an easy and fun to do thing
with Netbeans mobility support. Though this module was a good example,
there is a scope for development of applications for the device's own
operating system or platform independent application that are run on
special virtual machine(VM) software on the device. Using NetBeans as a
platform for development of J2ME applications, participants got a clear
idea that the former offers a special environment for creating platform
independent applications on mobile phones and other handheld device.
Participants learnt about the flow designer, the screen designer, about
displayables, commands, MIDLETs, etc. The entire crowd from morning
events had attended the workshop.

This concluded a successfully conducted Day 1 of our Software Freedom
Day celebrations - it totally rocked! And this wasn't it, the second
day was a lot more heavier and intense than the first! - and had a
sweet little surprise to - free pizzas during the install fest!

Day 2

All of us assembled again in the morning of the second day of our SFD
celebrations to begin with the much awaited talk on Free and Open
Source Software by me. The talk was held with a very clear perspective
to introduce open source and tell everyone what it actually implies,
about its history, about who all are the people behind the movement,
and their interesting story. The talk was assited with in-slide videos
clipped out from the popular movie on open source - Revolution OS.
Interesting clips showing interviews of the leading lights of the open
source movement were shown to tell the story of its very origin by the
people who started it, themselves - mainly Richard Stallma, Eric
Raymond and Linus Torvalds. I talked about the GNU, the FSF, the Open
Source intiative, about the 2 camps that had setup, and then about how
Linux proved the worth of FOSS. There was also a detailed discussion on
licenses, supported by prominent examples of open source software
complying with the terms of different breeds of licenses (CDDL vs GPL,
etc.). Cool features of Open Office like embedding videos itself into
the slides were demonstrated.

At the end, we had a brief session with the audience, when they got a
chance to clear their doubts, myth and misconceptions, if any. The
event attracted around 55 curious participants and lasted for about an
hour (we had to stop the session since Pizza was getting cold and
people couldn't wait!)

We then moved onto the computer lab. All participants brought their
laptops for the much awaited Install@Fest. The install really was the
soul of the celebration of SFD. We setup kind of a human freedom
toaster where anyone could come and get their CD/DVD burned with (any)
free software out of our collection. The main theme of the event was to
get free software, install it on their systems and get help doing it. I
gave a little talk on VirtualBox and how to OpenSolaris 2008.05 into
it. Students were told about the benefits of using OpenSolaris - ZFS,
Zones, Dtrace, SMF, etc and the ability to boot into a complete OS by
just running a DVD. OpenSolaris Starter Kit DVD's were distributed to
all participants. And now comes the fun part. To add revelry to the
event, FREE Pizzas and softdrinks were server to all the 50-60
registered participants. It was the most fun event of our entire line
up of events! (free software with free pizzas - a deadly combination!)

After the successful completion of Install@Fest, we had a hands-on-lab
session on NetBeans Plug-in Development, conducted by Varun Nischal,
previous year JIIT Sun Club coordinator, NetBeans Community Docs
Coordinator and NetBeans Dream Team Member. Varun briefly introduced
the NetBeans IDE to the students, as they were using it for the first
time. Focus was on practical usage of NetBeans Platform and
understanding the basics before plunging into deeper levels. Thought
provoking questions were asked by Varun from time-to-time, which made
this session a more interactive and unique one, as Varun had some
slides to complement the exercises. Students were given 2 exercises,
who followed step-by-step approach opted by Varun, as everyone was new
to NetBeans IDE. The 1st exercise covered the basics of creating an
Action in NetBeans, discussing the various types and the changes that
took place since NetBeans 6.1 FCS. Then, as a part of 2nd exercise,
Varun explained the importance of XML Layer and System Filesystem, what
is it all about, also demo'ed some tweaks which can have yield useful
results in short time. The plug-in was developed with comfort and
displayed "Hello World!" using the newly created Action from inside the
NetBeans IDE. Now, after taking the students out-of-the-box, Varun
ended the session by discussing the future prospects of the plug-in
development, and provided resources to look into for further study.
After all, open source is all about exploring and learning through self
study. The session was attended by 48 students, and lasted for nearly
60 minutes.

TuckTrail marked a wonderful end of JIIT's SFD celebrations. This
unique mega competition was held in three rounds: A Debugging round, A
Treasure hunt round and a programming round. The preliminary round
consisted of debugging some part of code, written in C++/Java, which
had to be debugged using Open Source IDE's like NetBeans, Sun Studio,
or the GNU tools (gcc, gdb, etc.) which entirely depended on the
preference/knowledge of the participants as an expression of their
freedom to choose. The second round was an online treasure hunt where
the participants obtained clues one after the other by solving
technical riddles inside a web browser, finally leading to the location
of a file stored on a server on the LAN containing the question to the
prgramming contest round. In the final round, the programming problem
needed to be implemented, again using any open source technologies as
mentioned above. At the end of the two hour event, the top two scorers
out of the 52 participants were awarded with 4 GB and 2 GB pen drives
respectively.

During the debugging round, only 4 of the entire 52 participants were
successfully able to debug the code under the time constraint of 20
minutes. Bonus points were given for the same. After the initial 20
minutes, the Link which also happens to be the output of the first
round was given to all the participants so that they can proceed with
the next round, i.e. the online treasure hunt. In the treasure hunt,
only 2 participants were able to track down the hints in a correct
fashion, and finally reached to the programming contest question,
whereas 5 other participants were only close to the final link, but did
not get it. Meanwhile the other participants were provided with
necessary hints to guide them through the entire course of second round
from time to time. Failing to perform under the time limit, the rest
were then provided with the final link of questions. The programming
round served to be a very interesting end to this mega event, as the
programming contest questions were designed in the manner that they
could easily test the very wits of any efficient programmer. Finally on
the basis of scores of each round and number of questions successfully
attempted in the last round, two winners were declared at the end and
were awarded with the prizes by Abhinav and me.

Winners of TuckTrail:
Second Prize Winner – Sachin Tiwari, I Year, winner of a 2 GB Pen Drive
First Prize Winner – Agastya Nanda, II year, winner of a 4 GB Pen Drive

I thank everyone who's helped us to make this possible, especially the JIIT OSUM Team for this tremendous effort:

Abhinav Shrivastava, Abhishek Punj, Anubhav Dayal, Prabodh Prakash, Ritika Gupta, Robin Pahwa

This video captures the excitement of students at the end of SFD celebrations at JIIT.

All photos of the event are uploaded to the OSUM site:
Software Freedom Day Celebrations at JIIT University (Day 0)
Software Freedom Day Celebrations at JIIT University (Day 1)
Software Freedom Day Celebrations at JIIT University (Day 1) -2
Software Freedom Day Celebrations at JIIT University (Day 2)
Software Freedom Day Celebrations at JIIT University (Day 2) -2

JIIT Sun Club

Presents

Software Freedom Day

(20th – 21st September, 2008)

At Jaypee Institute of Information Technology University, Noida

As the leading supporter of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in the world, Sun is proud to sponsor Software Freedom Day (SFD) 2008, and is gearing up to educate the world (especially students), about the benefits of FOSS and how it is Changing Y/Our World.

SFD Overview:
"In a time when our lives are increasingly dependent on technologies, it is important we take the time to consider the impact of technology on our lives, and the importance of ensuring technology isn't used to limit us, but rather to take us further along a path of opportunity, innovation and freedom for all people." Pia Waugh, President of SFI - 2007

Pia's vision is the impetus behind Software Freedom Day (SFD), a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) scheduled for September 20, 2008.

It gives us great pleasure to announce the celebration of a grand festival around open source technologies called the World Software Freedom Day, 2008 at our university, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology University from 20th - 21st September, 2008. Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of free/open-source software. In this direction, JIIT University Sun OSUM (Open Source University Meet up), JIIT University, formerly “JIIT Sun Club”, is organizing a two day SFD celebration event with support and guidance from Sun Microsystems under the Sun Campus Ambassador Program to expand the reach and spread awareness of open source technologies. As we all witness, the philosophy of open source has transformed our lives and the world at large. We have entered the Participation Age where all of us share, collaborate and learn instead of being users and audience of technologies. Today open source has given us the freedom to contribute. It is this freedom which we celebrate through the medium of our two day SFD event. The SFD celebrations would start with the "Relaunch" of JIIT Sun Club as JIIT Sun OSUM followed by introduction of the new team of JIIT Sun OSUM.

Navigation:

• Events
• Schedule
• Registration
• Coordinators

Sun has launched yet another great new and exciting opportunity for us to win fabulous prizes for just doing what we do best -- blogging about our favourite IDE and operating system's newest versions, describing our experience with their new features, how they score up to others, describing our user experience, sharing new usage tips, code samples, plugins or just about anything related to the new OpenSolaris and Netbeans IDE 6.1! - The Student Reviews Contest!

Prizes:

• 1 chance to win the grand prize of $250 in Visa Debit Card, and
• 5 chances of winning second prizes - each of $100 in Visa Debit Card.
  

Contest Period:
This contest begins at 12:01 A.M. Pacific Time (PT) Zone in the United States (e.g. San Francisco time) which is 7:01 A.M. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) on May 5, 2008 and ends on June 6, 2008 at 11:59 P.M. (PT) which is 6:59 A.M. (GMT) on June 7, 2008

All we have to do is:
1. Download OpenSolaris OS and/or NetBeans IDE 6.1. (If you have DVD, that works just as well.)
2. Test the product and post a review!
3. Submit the URL of your review.
4. Do it before June 6, 2008.

Need ideas for what to post to claim the top prize? Here are some suggestions:

a) Describe your OpenSolaris OS installation experience and what it took for you to make it up and running on your hardware platform
b) Run benchmarks and show how OpenSolaris OS performed against a competing OS
c) Create a "how-to" on solving a specific problem using OpenSolaris OS or NetBeans IDE 6.1 (use detailed instructions, code snippets, commands and outputs etc. as appropriate)
d) Share your deep insight about OpenSolaris OS or NetBeans IDE 6.1, including your favorite features
e) Give suggestions on how to enhance the OpenSolaris OS or NetBeans IDE 6.1
f) Build a cool plug-in to share with the NetBeans Community.

Here is a sample of what a review could potentially look like (read through all the 5 pages):

Judging:
All Entries will be judged by a panel of experts based on the following equally weighted judging criteria: novelty and originality of the review; usefulness and character of the substantive feedback; the review's interest and appeal to other users of OpenSolaris or NetBeans IDE 6.1; clarity in the expression about the user experience; how the review demonstrates or showcases specific features; and/or the ability to use the review to improve any aspect of OpenSolaris or NetBeans IDE 6.1.

Note:

• For this contest, students need to review either NetBeans IDE 6.1 or OpenSolaris OS. You can review both and submit as many entries as you want, but you can win only one prize.
• NO other products including previous NetBeans 6.1 Beta versions, Solaris Express Developer Edition, OpenSolaris Developer Preview, Solaris Express Community Edition, and Solaris 10 5/08 or eariler are included in this contest.
• OpenSolaris OS is what used to be called Project Indiana. It will be launched officially in CommunityOne on May 5th.
  

Read the rules (pdf). These are available on the contest site as well.

All submissions will also be featured on the contest website with pictures if provided.

So what are we waiting for people, let's see some winners from JIIT!

The release of Project Indiana is just around the corner (on May 5th). Me and some other CA's got the chance to get hands on to the bleeding-edge RC0 version from Sun, in order to get feedback about the release from as many students as we can. I was to conduct an InstallFest of sorts on campus at the end of which students would provide feedback about their installation experience, what they liked or didn't like about the new face of Solaris. I was very excited to get this opportunity to provide feedback directly to the OpenSolaris engineering team and the higher-ups at Sun, from students of JIIT! However, at such a short notice, there were problems in conducting an InstallFest in our labs, and past experience suggested that not many people show up at such an event, owing to the need of people carrying their rigs all the way from hostel to the academic block to participate. I thought out a much better way to conduct an InstallFest this time, which was bound to get good participation and would save all the trouble.. we conducted an InstallFest in the Hostel itself.

We successfully conducted a very unique novel event at our college on Sunday, which I like to call the "Virtual Installfest". What is a Virtual InstallFest? Well, In a regular installfest, members of a user group meet at a common place, bring their systems (CPU's or Laptops) along, help each other install their favourite OS, help each other troubleshoot particular problems, drink cola and have fun. A virtual install fest is one which is conducted with no physical gathering of the participants, rather one which is done digitally over the network. It is a new means of conducting InstallFests which avoids having to require the participant to take their CPU’s or Laptops anywhere and just participate in the event from the comfort of their Hostel Rooms. Yes, thats right, an InstallFest in which You don’t have to move around your precious hardware anywhere! Just be wherever you are and join us in the event!

Well, how exactly did it all happen?

To start with, I setup a local intranet website with Drupal, which:

• Had simple pages describing the concept of a virtual installfest, the details of how to participate in the event, prizes and giveaways, and links to launch the live screencast, join the chat conference, submit the feedback form, and the downloads section (more on all this later..)
  
  
  
  InstallFest Home
  
  
• Allowed a participant to register for the InstallFest, entering his personal details, and PC/Laptop configuration too. (Drupal custom profile fields)
  
• After registeration and logging in only could a participant get access to the Downloads section and the Feedback form (restrictions enforced by using the Taxonomy Access Control module for Drupal)
  
  
  
  Downloads Section
  
  
• Fill up a feedback form, which could be accessed from a link in the main menu as well as from a tab in the user's account section. The feedback form was a Drupal "content type" with CCK fields, which allowed rich-text entry too using TinyMCE. I used the nodeprofile module to restrict maximum population for that content type per user to 1, and to make it show in the user account page.
  
  
  
  Feedback Form
  
  
• Participants could logout and log back in anytime to edit their respective feedback forms.
• New downloads were made available at the Downloads section as and when required (sound drivers, etc were provided when participants requested in the chat conference).

The downloads provided were:

• OpenSolaris "Indiana" RC0 (latest build)
• VirtualBox for Windows
• VMWare 6 for Windows (trial)

The host (me in this case), conducted several "sessions", and in each session I installed OpenSolaris RC0 inside of a virtual machine (VirtualBox), broadcasting a Live Screencast of my screen to all the participants with the help of the RealVNC server and it's java client. I just set new connections to be shared by default allowing multiple clients to connect, and ofcourse, disabled remote keyboard / mouse inputs so that people couldn't take control of my system :)

All participants and the host were connected together in a chat conference. I installed OpenSolaris and everybody followed along, and whenever anyone had any problems, he could stop me by messaging in the chat conference. I responded with the solution over the conference, so that even others can rectify it if they encounter a similar problem. It turned out to be a true installfest thanks to the chat room, as in the later sessions, participants from earlier ones started helping new comers troubleshoot problems, which is the true spirit of an installfest I believe.. The chat conference was made possible with phpFreeChat, which is an amazing AJAX-based IRC-like chat application written in PHP. Setting it up was as simple as modifying some parameters in index.php.


I tried taking a screencast of the installation to replay later, but it just took too much processor usage, and made the installation slow, so I dumped that idea and just did the installations myself everytime.

As far as the prizes and giveaways are concerned, all participants were given OpenSolaris starter kits. All participants who successfully installed OpenSolaris on their systems (or inside of virtual machines) and filled up the feedback forms were entered into a lucky draw, the winner was awarded an OpenSolaris Mug, Netbeans 6 DVD, and a Sun Cap!

To conclude, the virtual installfest was a great success. Total participation was 43 students, despite it being a holiday and most of the students were outside hostel, and the event been conducted in a single hostel. I'm sure it'll scale well next time if I conduct it across the campus.

I have uploaded the local installfest website at http://installfest.jiitsunclub.org. It can be accessed by anyone, but registrations have been disabled. I just created a view using the "Views" module of Drupal, to allow sun-insiders to see the feedback. One may choose to see it first in a tabular form, to click on the person's name to see the complete feedback or just get all the feedbacks received on a single page. I have setup a "coordinator" role, and only users of this role would be able to access the "View Feedback" section.

I encourage other campus ambassadors to take up this idea and conduct similar virtual installfests in their institutes as it is an easy to conduct event, gets good participation and uses technology to the max! If anyone wants the drupal installation I had setup, I'll be happy to mail it to you.

Useful Links: 

• Blog post announcing the Virtual InstallFest
• Virtual InstallFest Poster (PDF)
  
• Virtual InstallFest Details (PDF)
• Virtual InstallFest Website (with the feedbacks) 

VIRTUAL INSTALL FEST

in HOSTEL!

LUCKY DRAW!

1. Install OpenSolaris      2. Submit the feedback form      3. WIN prizes!

What’s an Install Fest?
An InstallFest is an opportunity to get hands on help in installing and/or configuring OpenSolaris on your computer. Unlike the monthly meetings where you can only talk about your Solaris issues, at the install fest you can bring those problems to your peers and show them what is going on. It is also about getting to know your peers in the local Open Source User Group, and being able to share expertise and knowledge in a very informal environment.

What is a Virtual InstallFest?

• You don’t have to move around your precious hardware anywhere! Just be wherever you are and join us in the event!
  
  A virtual install fest is one which is conducted with no physical gathering of the participants, rather one which is done digitally over the network. It is a new means of conducting InstallFests which avoids having to require the participant to take their CPU’s or Laptops anywhere and just participate in the event from the comfort of their Hostel Rooms.
• Technology that will make a Virtual InstallFest possible: Video Streaming, Chat conferencing, File Sharing and Web Service over a LAN!
  
  Web Service: Participants register on a local website, and then get links to:
  • Download OpenSolaris Distro ISO
  • Download the post-install questionnaire
  • Get a link to view the live webcast
  • Get a link to join the chat conference

  Installation on a virtual machine: The host will install OpenSolaris on his system inside of a virtual machine
  
  Live Video Streaming: Host provides a live screencast of his system over the network, for others to see and follow along the installation process on their own systems.
  
  Chat Conferencing: The host and all the participants are in a live chat conference. If anybody has any trouble following the installation, gets stuck with any errors, etc they can immediately prompt the host to pause so that his problem can be resolved. The host responds with the solution over the conference, so that even others can rectify if they encounter a similar problem. The participants can also find it useful to share views, opinions or exchange messages related to their installation experience in the conference, just as they would physically in a standard InstallFest.

• It is upto the participant to choose to install either inside a virtual machine or on bare-metal on his system directly. It would be more interesting to install OpenSolaris directly from an install fest-perspective, though, you may install inside of a virtual machine like VirtuaBox or VMware if you don’t have enough space to install it as a separate OS (please note that installing inside of a virtual machine requires substantial amount of RAM.. > 512 MB recommended).

What do I need to do?

1. Open your browser and go to http://installfest (note that you will have to add “installfest” in your browser’s proxy exceptions)
2. Download and Install VirtualBox on your system (from downloads section)
3. Login and join the chat conference at http://installfest/chat
4. Catch the live webcast link and open it in your video player.
5. Wait for the event to start, once all participants have joined.
6. The host starts the installation on his system, which you can see streaming live to your video player. Install along on your system. Ask for any doubts or questions in the chat conference.
   
7. Once the installation is over, download the feedback form, fill it up with useful feedback. This feedback will be sent to the OpenSolaris engineering team to suggest the overall user experience in the installation process and initial use phase. We want to send them this feedback to let them know what university students feel about the OS and what they could do to improve it. This feedback is of utmost importance.
   

What to bring? Where to go?

You don’t have to go anywhere! Just logon to http://installfest at the stipulated time of the event and follow the instructions. Have fun installing Solaris!

What’s an Are there any prizes or giveaways?

Yes! :)

• All participants who successfully install OpenSolaris on their systems (or inside of virtual machines) and fill up and submit the questionnaire to us will be entered into a LUCKY DRAW.
  
  First Prize: An OpenSolaris Mug, Netbeans 6 DVD, and a Cap!
  
  
• Each participant will be given the OpenSolaris Starter Kit. It consists of 2 DVD’s, one with OpenSolaris Community Edition Distro and the other one with various flavors of OpenSolaris including Belenix, Nexenta, etc.

Hi,

I have been using NetBeans since its version 5.5 was shipped! I started using it in May, 2007. Since then, nearly 11 months have gone by, and to my surprise I am using these days NetBeans 6.0 and 6.1 Beta!

It was a great sigh of relief, when I came across NetBeans 6.0, so much spoken about it, and it was delivered, you may check out latest Sun Tech Days video, where Gregg Sporar(NetBeans Tech Evangelist) was interviewed about the NetBeans 6.0 features...
http://theupdatecenter.blip.tv/file/623936/

Anyways, if you thought thats cool, think again! As you would be surprised, when you would bootstrap NetBeans 6.1 Beta, which boots at a blazing speed. I was shocked when I tried it myself, with 512MB RAM, on my Windows XP.

Apart from that, you would also see some of the unique features, which you can see on prOgramming bOnds, NetBeans Dzone...

eNjoy TechnOlogy.....

Work in Progress..