Solaris Installation Notes -- Hardware
Time to time people ask me what HW to choose for Solaris and about Solaris installation in general. I am not an expert in this area but I played with Solaris installation several times recently, so I got some experience and I have some useful information to write about.
There are a lot of myths and prejudices concerning hardware supported by Solaris. I hear quite often that Solaris does not run on such a such HW configurations. This is typically not entirely true. Solaris runs on a lot of HW configurations but it may happen that a specific device is not supported. So, for example, you can end up without sound card support but Solaris will run on your machine. Here is a list of useful links:
- Laptop OpenSolaris community
- Hardware Compatibility List is a good source for checking what devices are supported and to get information about available drivers.
- Solaris Operating System for x86 Installation Check Tool can tell you whether your x86 system is likely to run Solaris 10 OS.
- Solaris Express Installation Check Tool can tell you whether your x86 system is likely to run Solaris Express, Developer Edition OS.
- The other option is to try one of the LiveCD OpenSolaris distributions -- BeleniX, Nexenta, or Schillix
- It is also possible to install Solaris on Intel Mac machines, see Paul Mitchell's blog.
- If you do not have suitable HW or do not want to overwrite your current OS installation you can also try virtual machines from Parallels or VMware.
