Work – Calum’s Wee GNOME Blog

Pick a clock, any clock.

After listening to the latest episode of Emmanuel’s podcast on the History of GNOME, nostalgia got the better of me, and I decided to dig out the GNOME 1.4 usability study that we ran at Sun Microsystems in March 2001, and make it available online again.

So in all its Web 1.0 glory, here it is. I haven’t updated any of the links, but I’ve also uploaded the participant script that the report refers to.

(As a bonus, for those of you reading on Planet GNOME, that hackergotchi is a lot closer to how I looked in 2001 than how I do in 2019, too.)

Solaris 11.4 released

Congrats to my colleagues in the Solaris team who released Solaris 11.4 today. Despite the 11.x moniker, this is actually a major Solaris release; Oracle has just decided to go down the perpetual macOS X / Windows 10 version numbering route from now on. (This development is unlikely to faze Solaris veterans, who have been using SunOS 5.x since 1992.)

Being the first major Solaris release in 7 years, it’s also the first to ship with a GNOME 3 desktop. So thanks, as always, to everyone in the GNOME and related FOSS communities who made that possible.

On a personal note, this version also ships the last significant Solaris project I worked on, which during development was known as the Analytics WebUI, but now goes by the marketing-approved moniker of the Observability Tools System Web Interface. It’s always nice when something you’ve worked on sees the light of day, and it’s even nicer when you know somebody else will have to deal with any complaints 😊

It’s alive!

For those of you who like to peek over the Linux fence from time to time, Oracle has just publicly released the first version of Solaris with a GNOME 3 desktop (3.24, to be precise), in the shape of the Solaris 11.4 Public Beta.

It’s been a few years since I was part of the Solaris desktop team, so this was nothing to do with me. But I did work on the Solaris Analytics BUI for two or three years, before moving on to Big Red pastures new.

Sunset

Edit: Since writing this post, I’ve been re-hired by another UX team at Oracle. I apologise to anyone who thinks this makes me a Bad Person.

Seventeen years and a few months after I joined Sun, today is my last day at Oracle.

I was already a grizzled 7-year usability veteran when I moved to Ireland in 2000 to work on GNOME for Solaris, and by extension, try to help the GNOME community figure out how to focus on and deal with usability issues. While it’s been a handful of years since I last actively did that, I’m posting this from our latest build of GNOME 3 on Solaris, so I guess I didn’t completely break everything.

Presenting Sun's GNOME usability study results, GUADEC 2001 — Presenting GNOME usability study results, GUADEC 2001

I’ve no idea what I’ll be doing next, but I do know it’s been a privilege to work with some of the smartest people in tech, not least in the the GNOME community, and the related open source projects that I worked on over the years. So to all of you reading this, thanks for that.

If anyone’s looking for a UX designer based just far enough outside Dublin that he’d prefer not to have to commute there every day, you can find me on LinkedIn, or any of the other places on the interwebs you’d expect. (As an emeritus foundation member, I even still have a gnome.org email address… but don’t use that as I haven’t updated my .forward file yet!)

A New Experience

Today, after a fraction over 12 years, I bade farewell to the Solaris Desktop team to join Oracle’s Systems Experience Design team, a.k.a. sxDesign, which has a wider but still largely Solaris-focused usability remit.¹

There’s been a good deal of overlap and collaboration between the two teams over the years anyway, so it’s not exactly a step into the unknown. The elders among you will remember the GNOME 1.4 usability study I presented at GUADEC in 2001, for example, which was primarily the handiwork of a previous incarnation of sxDesign… I pretty much just turned up at the end to steal the glory for the Desktop team. In your face, people I’m going to be working with now!²

While this pretty much brings an end to any ‘day job’ involvement I still had in the GNOME community (which has been basically ‘none’ for the past couple of years anyway), it certainly won’t be the end of my interest. If anything, I’ll probably be using GNOME more often again, albeit the ~~trailing-edge~~ enterprise-stable version we currently ship with Solaris 11. But I’ll certainly be keeping a keen eye on the GNOME 3 releases too, and continuing to call for its inclusion in Solaris as soon as is practical 🙂

¹ A move I was first approached about making in about 2003, I think… who says I’m rubbish at making snap decisions?

² I’m not really. They all left years ago.

I’m not going to GUADEC…

Is there a badge for that? 🙂

This will only be the second time since 2001, when I revealed how many users in our study had asked what the fried egg on the GNOME menu bar meant, that I haven’t made the trip. Other than the very first GUADEC in Paris, which happened just before I joined Sun, the only other one I’ve missed is Stuttgart in 2005.

So it feels a bit weird not to be going this year, but only a bit. It’s been a while since I made a useful contribution to anything GNOMEish (unless you count the daily ritual of deleting spam from the usability list admin queue), GNOME 3 seems to be getting along just fine without any of my suggestions, and for the time being I’m not even working on any desktop projects in my day job. So this time, I suspect, I probably won’t be back at GUADEC for a while… unless it makes a return to Dublin of course 🙂

Y’all have fun now!

What’s new on the Solaris 11 desktop?

This entry is cross-posted from my Oracle blog… clearly, seasoned GNOME blog readers will be less excited about GNOME 2.30, compiz and Firefox 6 than my audience over there, many of whom have been using GNOME 2.6 on Solaris 10 for the past 7 years 🙂

Much has been written today about the enterprise and cloud features of Oracle Solaris 11, which was launched today, but what’s new for those of us who just like to have the robustness and security of Solaris on our desktop machines? Here are a few of the Solaris 11 desktop highlights:

GNOME 2.30: It may not be the bleeding-edge GNOME 3, but GNOME 2.30 is the most stable version of GNOME ever released, and has many improvements over GNOME 2.6 as found in Solaris 10.
X.org 1.10.3: See Alan’s blog for details of this X server update.
Updated Firefox and Thunderbird: Solaris 11 ships with Firefox 6.0.2 and Thunderbird 6.0.2 from Mozilla.
Compiz: Solaris 11 uses this compositing window manager by default, enhancing the desktop experience with judicious use of customizable effects such as translucency, drop shadows and transition animations. (Not supported on all graphics cards, which will fall back automatically to the metacity window manager.)
Package Manager: IPS is the new package management system in Solaris 11, and it has a full-featured GUI that allows you to quickly browse and install new packages, or perform a live update of your entire OS in a couple of clicks, safe in the knowledge that it can be rolled back to a previous version just as quickly in the event of any problems.
Time Slider: Making its debut in OpenSolaris, the Time Slider feature that allows you take automatic, periodic ZFS snapshots and explore them in your file manager application now also allows you to make backups to removable media and network devices.
Network Auto Magic GUI: Allows configuration of the NWAM subsystem, including creation, editing and switching of network profiles and locations.
Visual Panels: A suite of GUI tools for system administration tasks, such as configuring firewall and SMF services.
GParted: The venerable Linux graphical disk partitioning tool, now ported to Solaris and included on the Live CD.
CUPS: The lp printing subsystem has been removed, and Solaris 11 now uses the open source *nix printing technology from Apple, with the same system-config-printer GUI found in several Linux distros.

Solaris 11 is free to download and use for most non-commercial purposes (but IANAL, so do check the OTN License Agreement on the download page first — it’s short and sweet, as these things go), and you can download various flavours, including a Live CD and a USB install image, right here.

Happy Solaris 11 Day!

Nearly seven years after the launch of Sun Solaris 10, today sees the official launch of Oracle Solaris 11 at an event in NYC*.

Oracle Solaris 11 Launch
November 9, New York City
Register Now!

There’s a host of new enterprise-class features in Solaris 11, including a modern package management system, live upgrade with the ability to reboot to previous known good versions, network virtualization, ZFS encryption and reduplication, and many SMF, DTrace, zone and security improvements. On the desktop, CDE has taken its final curtain call, and now GNOME (currently 2.30) takes centre stage. Solaris 11 is fully supported on both SPARC and x86, and it still has the best binary compatibility guarantee in the business.

The road to Solaris 11 has been a particularly long and winding one, of course. Starting from the closed source base of Solaris 10, Solaris was gradually open-sourced, mostly under the CDDL license. The OpenSolaris project was founded, part of which was a Sun-built distro called Project Indiana, under the brief leadership of Debian founder Ian Murdock. Project Indiana was a Fedora-like concept, with its own release cycle and the eventual intention of being forked to produce Sun’s next commercial release of Solaris (which at that time was codenamed Nevada, and seemed unlikely to be called Solaris 11 at launch).

Before its first milestone release, Project Indiana was somewhat confusingly renamed OpenSolaris, a fully-fledged, developer-focused distro that saw three releases, snappily called OpenSolaris 2008.05, 2008.11, and 2009.06. Then, of course, Sun was sold to Oracle, who (regrettably without any official announcement to the OpenSolaris community, just a leaked internal memo) closed it all up again**, and decided that the next version of Solaris was going to be called Solaris 11 after all.

Nearly two years of spit and polish, and an intermediate Solaris 11 Express release later, here we are at last. Enjoy!

* No, we’re not launching it on 11/11. Yes, it would be nice if US-based global corporations would hold their launch events in other parts of the world now and again, so some of the many thousands of non-US staff and customers could be there.

** Of course, once the open source cat is out of the bag, there’s no pushing it back in, and there are still some thriving OpenSolaris communities out there today, notably Illumos and OpenIndiana.

“That thing you burned up isn’t important to me.”

Interesting announcement from the LibreOffice project about their online and tablet versions. Those of you who’ve been around as long as me will remember that Sun had the same vision for StarOffice almost from the moment they acquired StarDivision, announcing the StarPortal project for browsers and PDAs somewhere around the end of the last century.

In the end, like all too many Sun projects, it was delayed, then subsumed into the SunONE Webtop project in 2001, and died off before it could gain any traction. Just goes to show that from a business perspective, being a decade ahead of the curve isn’t necessarily much better than being a decade behind it…

(Now) running 3.2…

Jasper and Florian pointed me in the right direction for getting my 3.2 jhbuild to run on F15, but the equally good news, as Pieter predicted, is that the F16 beta also runs perfectly well in VirtualBox 4.1.4 once you have the guest extensions installed. So in addition to the new 3.2 Live CDs, VirtualBox is also a viable way to experience 3.2 for yourself. (Although the F16 installer itself hung for several hours on a couple of occasions, but I decided to leave it alone anyway, and eventually it worked fine.)