Running Solaris Off a CD
This is wicked cool. So I ran into an old friend of mine who shall remain nameless because he is notorious for being wicked tall, wicked smaht, and for attempting a monster dunk. And missing it. (I wrote up the episode in detail, but I don't have a copy so I can't post it. Unless somebody with a copy is kind enough to forward it to me.)
He was manning the Solaris InstallFest booth so I stopped in and asked what's up. Turns out he's working on making Solaris installation easier. A lot easier. I remember the months I spent over a decade ago writing the Installation Manual for project Zeus, the pre-release version of Solaris 2.0. That book was 300 pages thick without any pictures. That was bad enough back then. It's almost inexcusable today. Looks like Sun is finally getting serious about fixing the problem. I pulled out my HP laptop.
Dave drooled.
"Wait," I said. "How much of my hard drive do you want?"
"Uh...6, no, 18, wait..... 20-um, actually, we'd really like 30 Gig," he said without blinking.
My hard drive was 80 Gig large and I only had about 60 Gig to spend. "Let me think about it," I said, and started stuffing the HP back into its backpack.
"Wanna run Solaris off this CD?" he asked me. From his tone of voice, I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd opened his trench coat and pulled a CD out from between the fake Rolex watches. But he was only wearing a T-shirt.
"Um.....OK," I said, wary.
Before I could stop him, he swapped his CD for the one that was in my CD-ROM drive and hit Alt-Ctrl-Delete. While the PC rebooted he examined the CD I'd ejected. "What's Zippers Performance?" he asked me.
"Engine control software for Harleys," I said, and put the CD away. He didn't believe me.
About a minute or two later the welcome screen for Solaris Express Developer Edition appeared on my screen. Dave hit Return, and a few moments later the Solaris GNU desktop appeared. I ran through the menus and opened a couple of the tools and I simply could not tell that it was being hosted off a CD. Wicked, wicked cool.
"It's a way of playing with the OS to see whether you'd like to install it," he said.
I wanted to use Firefox, email, and IM to see how fast they'd run, but I had to go. The OpenSolaris presentation was about to start. I'm going to ride into the Sun campus soon and take a little more time to try out this Solaris on a CD. Maybe it'll convince me to surrender those 30 Gigs on my laptop. I'll keep you posted.
- Rick
He was manning the Solaris InstallFest booth so I stopped in and asked what's up. Turns out he's working on making Solaris installation easier. A lot easier. I remember the months I spent over a decade ago writing the Installation Manual for project Zeus, the pre-release version of Solaris 2.0. That book was 300 pages thick without any pictures. That was bad enough back then. It's almost inexcusable today. Looks like Sun is finally getting serious about fixing the problem. I pulled out my HP laptop.
Dave drooled.
"Wait," I said. "How much of my hard drive do you want?"
"Uh...6, no, 18, wait..... 20-um, actually, we'd really like 30 Gig," he said without blinking.
My hard drive was 80 Gig large and I only had about 60 Gig to spend. "Let me think about it," I said, and started stuffing the HP back into its backpack.
"Wanna run Solaris off this CD?" he asked me. From his tone of voice, I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd opened his trench coat and pulled a CD out from between the fake Rolex watches. But he was only wearing a T-shirt.
"Um.....OK," I said, wary.
Before I could stop him, he swapped his CD for the one that was in my CD-ROM drive and hit Alt-Ctrl-Delete. While the PC rebooted he examined the CD I'd ejected. "What's Zippers Performance?" he asked me.
"Engine control software for Harleys," I said, and put the CD away. He didn't believe me.
About a minute or two later the welcome screen for Solaris Express Developer Edition appeared on my screen. Dave hit Return, and a few moments later the Solaris GNU desktop appeared. I ran through the menus and opened a couple of the tools and I simply could not tell that it was being hosted off a CD. Wicked, wicked cool.
"It's a way of playing with the OS to see whether you'd like to install it," he said.
I wanted to use Firefox, email, and IM to see how fast they'd run, but I had to go. The OpenSolaris presentation was about to start. I'm going to ride into the Sun campus soon and take a little more time to try out this Solaris on a CD. Maybe it'll convince me to surrender those 30 Gigs on my laptop. I'll keep you posted.
- Rick
