This was origially written at http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=137 and was subsequently archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20071003194718/http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=137 Solaris Hero: Philip Brown 22 Mar '05 - 02:16 by benr There are a lot of extraordinary people in this big community of ours who no matter how much praise they get always deserve just a little more. Generally, these are the exceptional people who don't ask for much but give and give and give and should be recognized more often than they are. One such person is Phil Brown. I've never met Phil or even mailed him, but he's done more for me that he'll probly ever know. His website, BoltHole.com, is a treasure trove of some killer nudgets of genious. He wrote FreeHA a Free, Portable High Availability system. KDrill, a "Kanji Drill" application to help people learn Kanji, including JDrill, a Java version. He wrote the excellent Phils quick-n-dirty intro to object-oriented thinking tutorial which is great for stuborn people like me, including a paper on OO programming in ANSI-C. He wrote several awesome introductions to AWK. He wrote a nice series on KSH scripting (I'm a zsh guy, but KSH is still common and his KSH papers are a great refresher). He's showered us in helpful Solaris X86 hints and tips and helped us fix out our laptops. But even with all that, what Phil is best known for is his Solaris device drivers. He's writte drivers for the Wacom USB Graphire 2 tablet, Epson USB scanner, the hugely popular USB scroll mouse driver, to name only a few. But perhaps more importantly (to me) he shared his knowladge with the rest of us with his Solaris driver developer tips and development frameworks for AGP, USB, and other drivers. He's not just giving us drivers, he's helping the rest of us develop our own. But even still, what not so many people realize is that he also wrote pkg-get, the script that makes Blastwave.org possible. Next time you save yourself hours and hours because you didn't have to build a package from scratch or manually track depenancies make sure you think of Phil and if you get a chance thank him for making it possible in the first place. (And then make a donation or buy a DVD.) What you might find most interesting is that he's a systems administrator. Its funny but some of the best programmers in the world are sysadmins by day. I really hope that one day I have the honor of meeting him. He's done more than most of us will ever know, including being a member of the elusive "Secret Six" that saved Solaris/X86 from certain doom. He's helped members of the community for years and years, and surely has done a hell of a lot of great things that I'll never know about. He's a hero to the community and we all appreicate what he's done for us past, present and future. - - C O M M E N T S - - I recently became aquainted with Blaswave.org and pkg-get. That is seriously the most underrated resource for Solaris I’ve ever seen. If OpenSolaris can team up with Blastwave…watch out Red Hat! All the stability of Solaris, all the fun of BSD, and without all the Linux fashion show. Anonymous - 22 March '05 - 23:37 Second that. Blstwave has made my Solaris experience much more enjoyable. The only weakness I see with Blastwave is that they distribute binary packages, which means you can’t modify any build time options (ssl yes/no for example). Thats why for some packages I preffer OpenPKG although now I have to deal with the rpm which isn’t really fun. Oh well, one of these days I should really try out NetBSD pkgsrc. Why imitate the BSD ports system when you can get the real thing. —Olaf Olaf Mersmann (Email) - 23 March '05 - 09:39 Being the kind of guy that never notices names, I had never realised all of this (and I have several of the papers you mentioned in my HD) came from the same guy. About pkg-get, it’s a cool tool but, I wished blastwave also offered an option of direct download of the packages Jaime Cardoso (Email) (URL) - 24 March '05 - 05:35