EXOTERIC - Information Worth Sharing: ex·o·ter·ic
-adj
1. Not confined to an inner circle of disciples or initiates.
2. Comprehensible to or suited to the public; popular.
3. Of or relating to the outside; external.

I finally got around to actually taking the latest OpenSolaris 2008.05 release (aka, Project Indiana) for a test drive. I already had installed VirtualBox on my MacBookPro, so the next step was to go and download the Live CD image. The ISO image file fits on a CD, so I fired up the Mac's Disk Utility to burn this on to a CDROM. The next step is to start up VirtualBox, select New and start working through the Virtual Machine Wizard. There is already support for OpenSolaris, so just select that OS Type. I stuck with the default Base Memory, but I did shrink down the virtual disk size a bit to 8Gb. The disk will automatically grow if it needs to, so you might as well start small. I did have to enable the CD/DVD drive in the Settings in order to get the boot installer to find the OpenSolaris CD.

The installer asks a few questions about language, timezones, keyboard and user accounts. About 2 hours later it was done installing. Don't forget to eject the CD before you reboot, or else you'll be back to the installer again.

Now I'm off to play around with it and see if everything is up and running correctly. Eventually I'll download the OpenSolaris source code, Sun Studio compilers and see if it builds.