Finally! (See part 1 and part 2) I have been wanting to check out Solaris for a few years, and now I have a fully functional system at home! Of course there were several roadblocks. CD errors. Drive space issues. Questions like: How do I boot from a CD? How do I format the hardrive? What does x error mean? Where do I go for support? all came up, but through extreme patience and an obsession for completing this project made this possible. Basically, if there could be an error or some sort of roadblock, I hit it.
For future Solaris installs in case I forget:

How to format a drive that was in one of my old Macs…format the drive in your Mac. The format command will not format all drives.
Tip for Mac users: Have an older Mac around thac can format a drive…and have a Mac OS X install CD handy incase you get a Disk Utility error which will not allow you to format a drive. (All signs pointed to “Jen do not install another OS on a non-Mac” throughout this entire exercise…it was hideous.
How to start up from an install CD, format … [more]

Well. Now that I have Soalris 10 installed (failure on disk 2 and disk 3), I have been trying to learn the ins and outs of the system. I have been struggling with trying to get Java Desktop System 3 to start up. I can work in Common Desktop Environment without any technical problems, but who wants to work in that? Since I had some failures with disks 2 and 3 with several attempts, I am going to try and do the install using NFS via my Mac Mini to try and eliminate any possible CD issues. At this point, I am warn out. Just when I think I have a solution, I run into another problem, but I am hoping..one last install will pay off. I now, after spending hours at docs.sun.com and reading a lot in the Sun forums, have a better idea about my partition needs as well as now knowing the install inside and out. (So I guess not all is lost) This has been quite the learning process, but I still have confidence that all this hard work will … [more]

I had decided last month to get a Sun machine so I could check out Solaris 10 (and Solaris in general). Why Solaris? Why not! Sun has been a leader in creating rock solid, high performance hardware and software, and now they have released Solaris for free. Time to check it out. I downloaded the four CD images from Sun’s web site (nice job with the redesign Sun!) and thought the process would be realitively fast and painless. Then reality sunk in. New hardware (Sun Ultra 10) and a new OS (Solaris 10) caused me some stress. Everything seemed to take longer than expected. Some of my roadblocks:

I wanted to start from scratch with a clean drive, but I did not know how to reformat. Research was done.
During my reformatting research, I realized that Sun requires a different partition scheme, so I followed what Sun recommended.
While trying to figure out the partition scheme, I realized I needed to get a bigger drive in my Ultra 10. (8 gig drive in there now) When I finally got around to installing the system, I had to cut … [more]

Here I am…thinking (dreaming) about replacing my Apple G4 Cube with a sweet Sun Solaris set up, since all my web development work at home is done with text editors and gimp.app. It is definitely time to learn Solaris, but I do not want to put out the $$ for Sun hardware (and yet I do not want to buy PC hardware either). Ken turned me on to Shuttle hardware which is a SFF (small form factor) maker, and their hardware looks pretty decent…and is something I am not used to…it is cheap. I built a complete computer for under $700 (I have a hardrive for it already) which Ken assures me would be a killer game machine if I actually put W on it. Yeah that’s right, I will not spell it out . This is very tempting for me (a cheap solution running Solaris), but now it is time to make sure everything will work nicely with Solaris. I will say I am very happy with Apple for making hardware purchasing so easy, but it is really quite wild to me to have so many options. Choose … [more]