ideas are free

Sun have released support plans to cover OpenSolaris (as in Indiana).

The “Essential” package includes:

• Business hours email & online technical support with 48 hour response (I hope that doesn’t mean an autoreply within 48 hours)
• OpenSolaris releases and package updates
• OpenSolaris bug logging
• Knowledge Base access
• Sun alerts
• SunSpectrum eLearning Library

Cost: $346.34AUD p/year

The “Production” package adds:

• Prompter responses to email and online support requests
• 24/7 Telephone support with 1 hour responses for Priority 1 calls (Whatever priority 1 means and who decides whether it is, I do not know)

Cost: $2308.94AUD

More detail available at Sun off course.

Considering that the last time I checked Microsoft were charging in excess of $80 per call and Applecare can cost up to $2,799 p/year - this is good value for money. It would be great to see this include a few extra bonus’ like perhaps a codec pack to be able to “legally” watch proprietary encoded media and DVD’s.

With HP’s acquisition of EDS I am wondering if the IT systems landscape could be in for a little bit of a shake up. For an IT services firm Accenture does have a steady focus on open source whilst already having a close relationship with Sun Microsystems. The two companies have very little overlap and display strong supplementary offerings (synergies) that could drive up revenues for both organizations. Both companies could quite happily go it alone instead relying on their strong partnership, however, strategically this would place them both at risk if the other were acquired by a competitor.

The Wikia Search platform which is currently in Alpha has made some progress forward in how a user may interact with the search results. Below I will go over some of the actions a user can take to improve the displayed search results in the new design released this month.

If someone was searching for, lets say, “German Cars”

They would end up with with a page of results much like any other search engine (albeit not as accurate during the alpha stage)

This new design  brings a number of new ways to interact with the search results whilst enabling some of the previously dormant features. Here I will take a look at adding and editing a search result.

Say for instance I thought that Mercedes Benz was worthy of a listing in the search results I could use the “Add to this result” feature to add them into the search results.

After clicking on “add” Mercedes Benz will appear in the search results:

As you can see Mercedes are now listed in the search results, although the heading and description don’t really say anything about the site. This is where you edit the result to make it more relevant to other users:

As you can see to the right when you put your mouse over a search result a few more options come up. To modify what the result displays we use the “Edit” link. After clicking on Edit two text fields appear for the title and a description:

After you save these details they will now appear against the search result:

I’m not really a full time Opera user but do find it handy for those sites that just wont work on Firefox.

For intel platforms go here and download the pkg.gz from your closest mirror (for Internode customers this is not metered if you select the AU - Internode HTTP or FTP mirror). Sparcies can find the package here.

Once downloaded extract the package by double clicking on it which will open up File Roller. Then cd into the path and type:

pfexec pkgadd -d opera-9.50-20080422.1-static-qt-sol10-intel.pkg

(For Sparc obviously use the correct package name for the Sparc variant)

In my experiencxe on Indiana the icon did not automagically appear in the Applications >> Internet menu. To manually add it in go to System >> Preferences >> Main Menu. Once you have selected the Internet  menu in the left column click on the green New Item button to the right. The Launcher Properties window will open behind the current window for some reason. Go to that window and enter the following details:

Opera should now appear in the Internet Menu.

And for the obligatory screenshot: see here.

For those who have jumped on the Indiana ship and tried to use Fluendo’s free MP3 decoder yet had no luck getting MP3’s to play with Rhythmbox or Songbird…

You need to place a symlink to where the libgcc_s.so.1 library is located in Indiana. You still have to follow Fluendo’s installation instructions, afterward there will be one more step:

First of all become root at the terminal by typing su root, pressing enter and typing in the root password. Once in the root shell type:

ln -s /usr/sfw/lib/libgcc_s.so.1 /usr/lib/libgcc_s.so.1

and press enter - now go to your media app and try playing an MP3 encoded file. Hopefully Sun can negotiate some sort of arrangement to get the Fluendo MP3 decoder into IPS so new users aren’t confronted with complex operations just to be able to play an MP3. Until then this will have to do :)

Note, this has been logged as defect 561.