Solaris x86 for the beginner

I have worked with Solaris on Sparc for over twelve years, and while I did install Solaris 2.6_x86 on a home PC back in 1998 (or there abouts) I can honestly say I don't remember much about it. Applying of course that I do remember something and that something is booting from a floppy disk (there, I don't remember what that floppy was called) and having to configure the mouse and VDU via some configuration GUI thereafter installation. Then having installed it I never actually used it, as I had a Sparc 10 after-all. I must also confess that I have Solaris running on LX50's and v40's in the Lab. But for these machines I simply installed via jump-start and cared for nothing else except for nfs and ssh access which the jump-start took care of for me. Oh, and I sometimes use the x86 SunRay server....

So having got myself an Acer Ferrari 4000 (which doesn't have a floppy disk drive) I now intend to run the latest release of Solaris Nevada on it and share with you my experience as I do so. I also intend at first to limit myself to using only public information and to keep the pre-installed operating system intact. The caveat at this time is that I will use a yet unreleased version of Nevada which may soon be made available as a Solaris Express Developer release, as that is what I've been asked to install.

Thus I now start to gather information from blogs.sun.com and OpenSolaris.org...

Stace

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Posted on: Jan 17, 2007

Posted by: ace

Category: Solaris

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Having been through it, I think your best sources of information will be public anyway. A google search limited to docs.sun.com, developer.sun.com, bigadmin, opensolaris.org, and blogs.sun.com generally turns up answers. The HCL is a good place to start: http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/

Posted by Walter Bays on January 17, 2007 at 10:54 PM GMT+00:00 #

Hi Walter, thanks for reminding me of the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). I see the Acer Ferrari 4000 is listed. However the page does not mention whether the installed Broadcom 802.11g Wireless BCM4318 is tested. Did you get this to work?

Posted by Stacey Marshall on January 18, 2007 at 01:27 PM GMT+00:00 #

Neat set of blogs. Something I have personally found useful in convincing folks to check out OpenSolaris has been the BeleniX liveCD. Once you show them the desktop comeup with all your windows and linux partitions automounted and able to check out all the Solaris features including dtrace, zones and zfs is pretty neat. Some of them then went ahead and installed the full blown Solaris 10 on their laptops and PCs. Without BeleniX, I dont think I could have convinced them.

Posted by Joe on January 20, 2007 at 02:15 AM GMT+00:00 #

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