Solaris (Intel and Sparc) is a rock solid Unix, unlike
other proprietary Unix it is available free of charge to
download $49.95 for the CD set or
$9.95 for the DVD containing SPARC and x86 versions.
Sun also make some very affordable hardware these days
so why not get the very best out of Solaris with a
workstation or laptop.
Solaris 10 is now available and has some great improvements
in speed and particularly the desktop, see the Window
Managers and Screenshots pages for more details.
To make a worthwhile installation you need to download the
Companion CD as well as the 3 installation ISO's, this is
also a free download. The downloaded files are zipped
iso's, just unzip and burn with Roxio, Nero or similar if
you are using Windows or cdrecord from Linux. Sun uses bz2
to compress the disk images, WinRAR will uncompress this
format, some of the images may have the extension rr
(Rockridge) just change this to iso and (in Roxio) select
"Record CD from CD image" from the file menu.
I have the Intel version installed on my old Compaq 166MMX
with 80M RAM and the performance was surprisingly decent.
The sparc version is installed on my Ultra 60 600MHz 512M
and this compares favourably to a much faster Intel box
running XP.
The installation is a breeze, providing;
a) You don't want to share the drive with another OS and
b) your hardware is fairly standard and preferably a few
years old
Before booting with the Solaris CD it is a good idea to run
DOS fdisk to remove any existing partitions and rewrite the
mbr with;
fdisk /mbr
Solaris uses the same partition type number as Linux (but
not the same filesystem) and leaving old Linux partitions
can confuse the installer. Equally if you remove Solaris
and want to reinstall Linux use DOS fdisk again to clean
up. Solaris makes extremely broken partition tables (at
least they appear broken to other OS) and you may find your
PC unbootable unless you use a DOS boot disk to wipe the
mbr and partition table. There is a HOWTO on dual-booting, but it is not
for the faint-hearted. For sparc machines boot, wait
for the memory test then hit stop+a to get to the ok
prompt
ok boot cdrom
Sparc only- if you are using a HDD which has not had
Solaris previously installed, you may get messages about a
"bad magic number", to cure this, during the installation
right-click open a new terminal window,
#format
Then choose the "Label" option, yes to continue, and close
the terminal, the install will proceed normally and you
will not get the error message on reboot.
Once installed you will be presented with the CDE desktop
which is stable and has a number of good applications, the
first thing you will notice is the high quality fonts.
Whilst you will hear a lot of people berate the CDE desktop
I am not one of them, Cut/Paste and Drag/Drop works
consistantly across applications, and it does not look that
bad. Star Office integrates well and is worth installing, I
found it performed slightly better than the Linux version,
although this is purely subjective, a port of OpenOffice is
also available.
Installing the extras on the Companion CD is easy, just put
in the CD, it will automount and run the installer where
you can choose the required packages. The main problem I
had was with my old S3 (765) video chip, the installation
defaulted to 8 bit colour and I had to hack
/etc/openwin/server/etc/OWconfig to make it work with 16
bit. Solaris only supports 8 or 24 bit, if you force it to
use 16 bit some applications(including the software
installer) will fail to run and produce lots of Java
exceptions. The Intel version uses the command
#kdmconfig
to set up the video card, keyboard, mouse and monitor, this
can be run (as superuser) anytime to reconfigure the
resolution and colour depth, logout to a console first for
best results.
Sun have now produced a port of XF86 for Solaris so a lot
more video cards are now supported, the 16 bit restrictions
still apply however.
For sparc machines the commands for video settings depend
on the type of card or chip, for onboard video chips use
#m64config -depth -res
or
#fbconfig -depth -res
the option
#m64config -prconf
after either of the 2 commands will list the resolutions
and refresh rates supported by your card, and if you use a
Sun Monitor, its' supported options.
Creator cards use
#ffbconfig -res
for 24 bit colour depth use the following depending on the
card you have;
Sun Creator 3D(old) #ffbconfig -deflinear true
Sun Creator 3D(new) #ffbconfig -deflinear true -g 1.1
Sun Elite 3D #afbconfig -deflinear true -g 1.1
Sun Expert 3D #fbconfig -deflinear true -g 1.1
PGX32 #pgxconfig -res 1280x1024 -depth 24
Mach_64 #m64config -res 1152x900 -depth 24
To test if you have an old or new Creator 3D card
#/usr/sbin/ffbconfig -propt
If the output of this command contains the phrase "gamma
correction" then you have the new card.
Note: When ever you see the # sign used on this site, this
denotes a root shell command prompt
There is an excellent FAQ here for Intel and if you want to
use Solaris to learn Unix then download the
documentation from Sun.
