Århus : Weblog

I want to encourage people to try what is free. Sun offers everybody to download the Solaris 10 Operating System for free and install it on their PC or Sparc computer. I use Solaris everyday at work, but my home computer runs Windows. I don't want to write here about why I need Windows at home (esp. on my own Dell Inspiron 9100 notebook, which Solaris HCL lists as "partially supported" — WLAN NIC and other devices are missing Solaris 10 drivers). I wanted to have the experience of a user who tries to download and install Solaris 10 as if I was not a Sun employee (and had access to the latest build of Nevada).

Download was very easy. The Solaris 10 web page has a Get the software button which heads you to the download centre, where you select what to download and what media to use (CD/DVD). I tried to download and burn both, but the Dell Precision 330 Workstation, which I will use to run Solaris, does only possess a CD-ROM drive. So I downloaded (with superb high speed of 300 kB/s and more on my 2Gbps DSL line) five CDs: CD1, CD2, CD3, CD4 and LangCD. I cannot use the Software Companion DVD download, since it is only available as a DVD.

Installation was easy as well. But here I cannot make an objective statement, since I have a long experience of Solaris installer testing, so I know every screen of the installer. But even though I knew what I can expect from the installation, I printed the Unofficial Installation Guide for the Solaris OS, x86 Platform Edition, which deals with installing Solaris in a multiboot environment. I obviously wanted to preserve other partitions on my disk drive. And this is a very important point, since I remember formatting the whole drive when I was installing Solaris 7, which was my first experience with Solaris in the early days at the university. There is one screen in the installer which you must recognize and make sure what you answer — don't let the installer use the whole disk for Solaris installation. Rather go ahead with customizations and select only the partition (or unused space) which you want to be used for Solaris. Make sure it says in the summary, that you have allocated less than is the size of the drive for the installation (I have a 20 GB drive and I have devoted 9,5 GB for Solaris).

If you install Solaris in a multiboot environment, you will be glad it automatically installs GNU GRUB boot manager, which lists Windows (and other systems) in the boot menu automatically. Unfortunatelly, it doesn't load drivers for USB keyboard, so you need to use PS/2 keyboard in the boot menu.

I was very surprised that the JDS 3.0 environment (which you can choose from when you first login to the desktop session) is translated to Czech. It really makes the switch from Windows easier for the user. And hopefully my girlfriend will be more likely to give Solaris a try... ;-)

Comments:

I've been able to use the Solaris Companion DVD on systems with only CD drives by one of two methods.

1) Extract DVD contents on same Solaris 10 computer and install directly from extracted image [man lofiadm], or;

2) Extract DVD contents to your hard drive, delete the architecture folder you don't need (Sparc or x86) and burn the remaining files to CD. This single-architecture mod should fit nicely for now, but no guarantee on things in the future, or;

3) Extract the DVD contents and share on your local LAN and install from there.

Posted by Wes Williams on květen 12, 2006 at 02:58 odp. CEST #

Thanks Wes for your suggestions! I used the third option and it worked very well, the Samba support is automatically installed in Solaris, so browsing the network is very easy.

Posted by Petr Tomasek on květen 12, 2006 at 06:11 odp. CEST #

No problem Århus, I'm glad it worked for you. And yes, I can count, but forgot to update the first line of my last reply after breaking apart the original two work-arounds into three distinct ones.

I've found Solaris to be a great desktop OS (that's what I use it for) but wish the installer were a little easier to enable faster uptake of this great OS by less technical types; especially those without much networking experience. Then again, the installer is somewhat antiquated, like the BSD installers, since you'll rarely ever use them. 8)

Posted by Wes Williams on květen 13, 2006 at 02:45 odp. CEST #