Friday, August 29, 2008

Having to learn Solaris on a platform different than Solaris

During the JRSL08 I attended a lecture sponsored by Sun. The lecturer handed out, together with an opensolaris CD, some brochures or sheets of paper as I like to call them with some info to access Sun's Academic Initiative (SAI), in other words, access to the courseware in order to learn Solaris to get certified or just learn (link).

I created my account a few days ago, added some courses to my learning plan and moved on to my usual work. Today I decided to try out a course in my plan only to see that accessing a random course brings Firefox down, after two other attempts and figuring out it wasn't some random thing I went on to the technical support section to find out that my patform wasn't supported.

So my computer is reported as a SunOS, more precisely:

$ uname -a
SunOS nargothrond 5.11 snv_93 i86pc i386 i86pc Solaris


So these are the platforms that skillsoft supports:

Microsoft

SkillSoft e-Learning solutions are supported on the following Microsoft Operating Systems.

  • Microsoft Windows NT 4.0
  • Microsoft Windows 2000
  • Microsoft Windows XP
  • Microsoft Windows Vista

Apple Macintosh OSX

SkillSoft has only tested using Mac OS X version 10.4. While you may be able to play SkillSoft content with later versions, to ensure full compatibility, SkillSoft recommends this version.

Linux

SkillSoft has only tested the KDE and GNOME desktops using SuSe Linux version 9.0, 9.1 and 10.0. While you may be able to play SkillSoft content with other versions, to ensure full compatibility, SkillSoft recommends one of these versions.


That sucks big time, no Solaris and look at what it says about Apple and Linux... I'm going to try and update flash and then Firefox to three dot o and see if that does the trick....

Friday, August 22, 2008

Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre


So here I am quite alone at the JRSL in Buenos Aires. I've met some interesting people. On the first day I probably listened to all of Dag Wieers' talks and looked for him in between to talk some more.
I also chit chatted with Christoph Hellwig and commented about Intel being in Cordoba, he sounded quite interested until I mentioned that we work on services there.
One of the greatest talks was on Thursday, by maddog, it was quite impressive, there was live streaming, so I guess there'll be a video out any time, anyone who couldn't see it should check it out.
I also go my picture taken with maddog :-)

Well I'm off to maddog's next talk...