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Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Solaris

Just for sake of experiment, I tried installing Solaris x86 version. Sun people are giving away the Developer Edition free of charge. I requested for a DVD and got one within 2-3 weeks
Link : http://developers.sun.com/sxde
  I've removed my 20GB disk and got an old 40GB. Kept XP and BT on 160GB disk. This meant I had to edit my current partitions. Needed to delete the BT and Games partition. After backing up my data went through the process. Kept 40GB disk unformatted and created necessary partitions on 160GB
Installation of Soalaris was quite easy, though it took 60-70 minutes to finish all the steps. I like the way most Linux and this Solaris get installed. You fill up all the options early in installation and rest of the process goes by itself without any need to supervise unlike Windows. Damned thing needs date time setting, license key, usernames, passwords etc. in the middle of installation. That means, you need to stay in front of the PC all the time while in Solaris, Linux you are free to do anything else, get coffee, read, anything.
    Once the instalation was done, LILO boot menu of BT was replaced by GRUB. In addition to Solaris it showed 3 Windows partitions. Solaris booted fine but windows needed some tweaking to get  working.
 Solaris had some other surprises. At first it has no GUI. Just command line. I was sure I selected the proper GUI installation option and had right system specifications (512+ MB RAM, 12GB + free HDD space). So started playing around,
Tried some Unix commands and after sometime finally got into Solaris Desktop.Its GNOME and behaves pretty much like it does on Linux installations, though looks different.  Default Solaris installstion is pretty much like Windows, barely enough to start working, but considering the fact that it occupies 11GB+ space, its kind of odd. Installing Linux software didnt work . There are separate packages for Solaris.
There isnt much to write about it now. I tried playing around, it isnt difficult to operate, no more than most Linux/Unix installations in market, but is of no use at home. Place where am working has 8 Sparc servres, 4 running RedHat, one Windows Server and rest Solaris. I guess I'll conduct all my experiments there only. ;)
Installed BackTrack3 again. It gave more problems than I anticipated. But managed somehow. Deleted Solaris and now PC is back to older config. If I feel like it, I'll use VMware or some other virtualisation software to run Solaris. Permanent install on HDD isn't worth it (at home)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

i can understand only a few terms here :| but in one year i hope i'll be able to do my own installations B-)

and do something about hindi fonts in your linux.

m said...

You can do better than that

I'll do something aoout that. Don't worry ;)

m said...

You can do better than that

I'll do something about that. Don't worry ;)

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