Octavian Tanase's Weblog: In the pursuit of development 2.0

The reader may be familiar with my previous efforts to install Solaris on my MacBook Pro. The results have been mixed: I've succeded, however the experience was somewhat painful. I had decided to give the eng team some feedback, time and try it again. Thanks to Ludo for inspiring me. A few month later I gave it another shot: installing the latest iteration of the Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE) on my MacBook Pro. Nota bene - I already have Vista and Ubuntu Feisty running under Parallels on my precious MacBook Pro.

This time I've tried using Nevada build 70a and the results have been impressive. Eureka! I have a fully functional Solaris (Nevada)  install, running virtually via Parallels. Hey, is not Ubuntu easy yet, but a huge improvement. Thanks Don and Jeff for not giving up.

Here is some tips if you want to give Solaris a chance (I believe you should):

• Download this version of SXDE. Folks keep in mind that this is work in progress and some of the builds have serious bugs
  
• Prepare yourself to spend a while (120 minutes) installing, so go through installation while plugged in to a power source
  
• Accept defaults
• Solaris seems to like for you to be networked while rebooting after the install
• Extra credit - change the resolution to the native one on a 15" MacBook Pro (1440x900)
• login and become root
• cd /etc/X11
• cp .xargs.conf xargs.conf
• edit xargs.conf as follows (at the end)
• Section "Monitor"
          Identifier   "Monitor0"
          VendorName   "Monitor Vendor"
          ModelName    "Monitor Model"
          HorizSync    31.5 - 100.0
          VertRefresh  59.0 - 75.0
          Option      "dpms"
          Modeline "1440x900" 108.84 1440 1472 1800 1912 900 918 927 946
  EndSection
  
  Section "Device"
          ### Available Driver options are:-
          ### Values: <i>: integer, <f>: float, <bool>: "True"/"False",
          ### <string>: "String", <freq>: "<f> Hz/kHz/MHz"
          ### [arg]: arg optional
          #Option     "ShadowFB"                  # [<bool>]
          #Option     "DefaultRefresh"            # [<bool>]
          #Option     "ModeSetClearScreen"        # [<bool>]
          Identifier  "Card0"
          Driver      "vesa"
          BusID       "ISA"
  EndSection
  
  Section "Screen"
          Identifier "Screen0"
          Device     "Card0"
          Monitor    "Monitor0"
          DefaultDepth     24
          SubSection "Display"
                  Viewport   0 0
                  Depth     24
                  Modes     "1440x900"
          EndSubSection
  EndSection
  

What you get (in addition to a solid, feature reach OS): compiler, tools (for both native and Java dev), middleware components - application server, web server; productivity tools - StarOffice/Firefox/Thunderbird, etc. The complete list of details can be found here.