A View from the Rainy Northwest Kier Gombart's Weblog

If you're like most normal folks, you don't have a computer lab in your home, and definitely don't pack one around with you on the road.  But with VMware and a couple operating system iso images, you can be up and running with a fully functional lab.  I wanted to run Sun Update Enterprise edition, but I needed Linux for the server (at least until December, when it will be running on Solaris 10).  Here's what I did with my windows/solaris laptop... (make sure you have about 30gb free disk and 1 gb RAM)

1) Use Partition Magic to toast my Solaris partition (I don't keep my data here), and grow my Windows partition
2) Download VMware from VMware's web site and install on your Windows partition (they really need a Solaris host!)
3) Run VMware and create two virtual machines (they are a piece of cake to create)  I made mine 12gb each and called the first one Solaris 10 and the second one Linux
4) Download the iso images for both Solaris 10 and Suse Linux
5) Configure the first virtual machine to use the Solaris 10 iso image as its cdrom (help in documentation)
6) Start the first virtual machine and bingo... the Solaris 10 install starts... go ahead and install it.
7) Configure the second virtual machine to use the Linux iso image as its cdrom
8) Start the second virtual machine and yep... you guessed it... you can run through the Linux install now
9) Once you have both instances installed, switch to the Linux machine and install the UCE SDS server
10) When you create the Solaris agent, put it on a RW cdrom or USB stick so that you can run from Solaris
11) Switch to Solaris machine, copy over the Solaris client, and install
12) Within minutes, you should see the client show up in your SDS server console

There are a bunch of tips and caveats that come with the DHCP addresses, NATing, and firewalls that I haven't gotten into, but you get the basic idea.  It took me about 6 hours (in 3 evening sessions) to get my environment up.  It felt good to get techy again.

Good luck with your install.!

This last weekend, I went down to my hometown, a rural place in southern Oregon, and had an opportunity to get my younger kids, Meagan and Elliot, to an art festival. There, they attended a class on spinning wool, learning from a spinning club founded by "veteran" craft folks in the area. It was great to sit and watch the older folks pass on their crafts to the younger folks. What surprised me, was how involved and enthusiastic my kids were in learning how to spin and creating yarn!  They have bought yarn at stores, and know they can get yards and yards of it for cheap... but they loved that they were making it.  And they were going at it for hours. I asked my youngest, Elliot, what he liked about spinning, and he said "just like making the yarn, lots of it!".


That desire to create is at the heart of why we do things. I think the desire to use tools and create is genetically coded in each of us. At Sun, I see the same thing. Folks just want to create things, be a part of making something, even if it is just a piece of the final product. They get really good at their work, and take pride when someone remarks on how well they do it. I think that's why we have so much problem buying off the shelf products, because we know we can build it, with our own tools, and do it the exact way we need to. The cool thing about this... it leads to innovation, and great use cases for Sun technology.