A userland welcome to Open Solaris
Tuesday Jun 14, 2005
OpenSolaris is live! Unfortunately the CD drive on my laptop is dead. Sometimes even a minor problem can get in the way of our enjoying something really cool. It's like when your brand new car runs out of gas. I'm hoping we can smooth over any rough edges in OpenSolaris. The number of OpenSolaris blog entries is overwhelming. Hackers, kernel experts and students have some great new reading material! I'm already impressed by outside contributers to OpenSolaris, such as Blastware's planned port to PowerPC. I don't know who will be more excited, those of us who would like Solaris on our Apple Powerbooks, or those who want to run it on IBM's hardware. How can a desktop mechanic help? Well, I don't think there's an "OpenSolaris for Mechanics" yet, but here, in no particular order are a few tips which helped me. I'll post them here in case they might help newcomers to OpenSolaris. If others have tips or links to tips, please let me know.
- 1.)If you'd like to install Solaris alongside another operating system, look here.
- 2.)Make sure you allocate enough swap space during install. The default Solaris installer can be skimpy on swap space. Just because most X86 boxen have less than a dozen CPUs and only a couple hundred Gigs of storage doesn't mean you shouldn't allocate a few hundred Megabytes of swap space.
- 3.)Workaround for gnome-settings daemon error. The contents of /var/tmp can persists through Solaris reboots. This can cause intermittant GNOME lock file conflicts. By default, /tmp is taken from swap space which is wiped out on reboot. To change your login so that gconf and bonobo store their temporary stuff in /tmp, edit .dtprofile, and add:
TMPDIR=/tmp export TMPDIR
- 4.)The Rosetta Stone for Unix doesn't yet reference zones or the Service Management Framework, but it is still a useful reference as are the Solaris one liners.
- export PATH=$PATH:/usr/sfw/bin. This is where you'll find gcc and similar tools.
- 5.)Manage packages with pkgadd, pkgchk, pkgrm and pkginfo. Manage patches with with smpatch.
- 6.)For those who prefer gui administration, Sun Management Console (smc) is included. It isn't in the default Java Desktop System menus, but if you installed everything, you'll find it in /usr/sbin/smc.
- 7.)SMF Administration with Webmin which is another management GUI which is built into Solaris 10.
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