It was a fantastic success! We started about half an hour late, then worked dilligently for a full three hours.
No one came. Only Julian and I worked.
I got bit pretty hard by my own rules because I needed a molex-to-SATA power cable, which I know for a fact villan has and could probably give me in about 5 minutes, but the rules prevented me from asking him. Cable-request distractions are forbidden! I used a SATA power cable out of my firewire-to-SATA case, and sacrificed two floppy drives to solder together something to mate the firewire-case power cable with the floppy cable inside my Sun. This took at least an hour, including putting away all the tools and throwing out the trash.
My todo item was to move a SATA drive from its external firewire case to an internal SATA card in my Sun Ultra 10. I bought a Marvell SATA controller that uses the same chip in the Sun X4500 based on opensolaris mailing lists, but was sabatoged by Sun's (fanboy's) lies and the fact that most of Opensolaris is actually still closed-source. Sun will no doubt argue with the last statement because they define the deceptively-named OpenSolaris as a piece of an operating system rather than a bootable, self-hosting platform as most people expect when they hear the name. The name for the latter is ``Solaris Express Community Edition'', and it takes up 5 CD's and is free as in free-beer. The OpenSolaris source tarball is under 60MB as of 2006-08-01. The 50-1 size comparison isn't totally fair because the CD's contain some GNU ports for which I'm sure there is source laying around somewhere if I can figure out how to use their package management system.
I'm still excited by what's going on at Sun, but I really hope they don't treat their open source juggernaut like a bastard stepchild the way Apple did with Darwin. Mac OS X walks and quacks a lot like a closed-source operating system, and I'm starting to feel the same way about OpenSolaris. If they had really delivered the ``transparency'' of open-source, anyone could have looked at the marvell88sx source and its Makefiles and noticed that they don't build a SPARC version, instead of speculating based on commit logs. And complaining that their hands are tied because they're getting yanked around by some pissant Taiwanese ASIC company is no excuse.
I don't think Sun's behavior is over-the-top ridiculous. I guess I have an extremely short fuse when it looks like a group is profiting from confusion they've helped sew.