Statement of Intent

This blog is not an advertisement for what I know, but an exploration of what I do not know. Admitting how much I do not know is the first step in overcoming my fear of looking foolish. I will make mistakes, but my intent is to learn from those mistakes and hopefully to uncover information useful to someone somewhere.
My first post is a laundry list of haphazard steps for bringing a clean computer from a Nexenta Alpha 6 install to a running build of Eclipse for solaris-gtk-x86. I am not a Unix or a Linux guy, but I am interested in the problem that Nexenta is trying to solve (i.e., combining the OpenSolaris kernel with the gnu utilities and the debian package manager). I am only slightly an Eclipse guy in that I have been developing an RCP application for the past 10 months. I am not involved with the Eclipse project.
Subsequent posts in the near future will probably be a reflection of the tips and tricks I encounter while doing Eclipse RCP development or Java development, but they may branch into areas of process (I recently accepted a position at an Agile company) or higher-level software engineering.
Hopefully these future posts will be shorter.