installing solaris 10, part 3.
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
formatcommand 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 the drive, and partition the drive
- What to do with the error: Unexpected token…/etc/driver/aliases” tha repeated for over 10 minutes straight before I got to the
OKprompt. Wow, that was trying. I only figured this out because I was so frustrated I thought I would leave it alone and play a few SoCom 3 games…after the third round when I saw the OK prompt, I was so excited! - How to add users
- What to do with the error: XServer does not support the XRandR extension
- Use the Sun Software Download Manager to download updates, etc
Overall, I am very happy things finally worked and I am able to work with Solaris for professional development. I am actually writing this post from my Sun Sparc workstation right now! Here are some screenshots of my environment. I still need to get the resolution to something acceptable, but it does what I need it to do now.
[tags]Solaris 10, Sun[/tags]
installing Solaris 10, part 2.
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 pay off. If nothing else, I now also know CDE. More to come.
[tags]Solaris 10, Sun[/tags]
installing Solaris 10, part 1.
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 a lot out.
- I have never purchased/formatted a drive for a Sun machine, I had to do research to make sure I could use the 20 gig IDE drive I have laying around
- I was not familiar with the Sun support section, so I had to learn how to get around that on top of everything else.
- The CD install was amazing slow.
What I have learned so far: I am a terminator. Five hours into this process I was still determined to get everything running. I also realized that A is extremely patient with all my computer equipment all over the house. Thanks! I also realized that this whole process, frustration and all has been and will be a great experience for me to go through, and I look forward to actually using Solaris this weekend once I get the other drive in place. I will have more to report this weekend when I re-install the system with the bigger drive.
[tags]Solaris 10, Sun[/tags]
and the winner is: Sun Ultra 10.
Time to learn Solaris, yeah. Time to get a PC, no. 😉 I finally got a Sun Ultra 10 lined up for me, and should hav eit some time next week. I am not looking for speed or anything much, just something to play around with, learn Solaris, and get serious about high availabilty servers. If all goes well, I will have a Sun Blade 1500 someday. On another note, Fedora FC3 is working out well, and I am enjoying learning the ins and outs of it.
[tags]Sun[/tags]
solaris and an umbrella.
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 your poison I suppose. Back to Sun’s web site to check out the forums.
PS, while searching for “SN95G5, Solaris” I came up with something crazy (the umrella part of the post). Can’t get too much mroe random than that.
[tags]Solaris 10, Sun[/tags]