Solaris

[SEGMAT]

I haven't run Solaris yet, but I have the CD/DVD's on route to my house right now. I'm planning on testing it on one of my secondary computers, I don't want to get rid of Mint! I'm just wondering what anyone's heard or experienced with Solaris. I'm still a newbie to Linux so if Solaris is not very newbie friendly, please let me know so I don't have to bother with it!

Thanks,

Matt

[Boo]

the problem of installing solaris on X86 is the hardware compatibility.

guess what it works perfectly on Sun x86 hardware.
the older and more obscure your hardware the less likely it will work.
so using tier 1 hardware like: SUN, HP, IBM is best.

you can not dual boot your solaris system since solaris wants to partition the disk how it wants to.
when you install you pretty much take all the defaults and let it do its stuff.
If you don't mind loosing everything on the system you are going to install it onto go for it. nothing like learning more unix.

The question is why do you want to use solaris?

[clem]

The only thing I like about Solaris is the name... but don't be mistaken, this is not a user-friendly operating system. If you're looking for a distribution that helps you learn more about Unix I would recommend trying out Slackware.

Clem

[scorp123]

if Solaris is not very newbie friendly

No, it isn't

Solaris is a "Professional OS" ... e.g. something I'd run at my day-job on my 8-CPU machines with 32 GB RAM. You as home user won't find it appealing at all. And without the proper level of knowledge or at least a minimum level of proper Solaris training you probably won't even be able to put it to any reasonable use. No offence intended here, I am just stating facts. From a home user's perspective Solaris is probably "ugly" as hell and hard if not even impossible to understand. From that POV Linux is sooooo much "friendlier". Solaris isn't about "being friendly" to home users. Not at all. Home users are not even the target market for Solaris. Solaris is about running on servers, being maintained and monitored by full-time UNIX admins; Solaris is about serving "enterprise critical" applications to thousands of users ... and not about giving one single user a nice cozy desktop.

You can still install it of course ... but if you don't even know Linux that well, then Solaris will be a total horror trip in complete darkness. Besides: Chances are that you will hose your system. The Solaris Installer doesn't take prisoners ... if you tell it to install it doesn't give a /bin/sh about killing your partitions or not, it just installs itself. Here *you* really *really* need to know what *you* do.

I'd suggest you postpone tinkering with Solaris until your Linux knowledge has improved to a level where you may call yourself "experienced Linux user" .... or you take a Solaris "UNIX Beginner's" training from SUN Microsystems Inc. ... they cost like 2000$
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[clem]

Another solution is to use a virtual machine (VirtualBox or VMWare for instance) and try out Solaris in there.

Clem

[SEGMAT]

Thanks for all your relies.

The reason that I wanted to install Solaris was because during my distro hunting I came across it and it seemed not too bad. I also found out that they shipped free CD's so I decided to get them to do that. When the CD's come I was thinking of just trying it out. I'm really happy with Mint right now and I'm super happy I left Ubuntu and so I'm not really looking for something new right now, I was just curious. If it's even half as bad as you say though, I wouldn't run it so I'll leave it alone. I'll keep the CD's but keep them in the pile of what to do if my other Linux's stop doing what I need them to do. With how Mint seems to be working right now though, that won't be for a long time.

Thanks for Mint everyone, I love it, and the community here is great!

Matt

[Epsilon]

If you wanna learn more about unix why dont you try BSD, slackware or gentoo.

[scorp123]

Just to add a few Solaris 10 screenshots here ... As you can see the "Java Desktop" Solaris 10 ships with is in principle a modified GNOME (and an old version too).

[D-EJ915]

Here are a couple of screencaps from when I had solaris express community edition on my sunbox:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v104/ ... munity.png
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v104/ ... olaris.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v104/ ... /smexy.png

Kinda funny you have an Ultra 20, my computer is an Ultra 20 M2 imagine that

express community edition really has everything you could possibly need. It didn't have drivers for my chaintech AV-710 and I didn't feel like making any so I switched over to linux, heh.

Funny thing is, my netgear wireless card refused to work in any form of windows but worked right away on solaris

[Forestarius]

I recently tried Solaris. It was like going back in time to pre-Ubuntu/Mint times when fonts were unreadable on normal monitors. It looked like it would take way too many hours of work just to bring it up to modern Linux standards so it went away after a few days. It was fun to look over it for a few hours, but not worthwhile to keep.

The install finds every drive on the system and deletes every partition. I think the OS install would make the perfect weapon system if they could make it attack over a network or even over the internet like that.

[scorp123]

It was like going back in time to pre-Ubuntu/Mint times

Yeap. Commercial UNIX flavours make for great 'time machines'. Try HP-UX if you ever get the chance (needs a PA-RISC or a IA-64 machine ...): You will feel like being back sometime in the mid-1970's

The install finds every drive on the system and deletes every partition.

Yeap, Solaris takes no prisoners. The perfect gift you can make to Windows 'power users' ...

[flycharlles]

If you want to try Solaris,why don't you try the Nexenta LiveCD,it is a an Ubuntu based distro but using solaris 10.Also Belenix,i don't know much about it.
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=nexenta
http://www.nexenta.org/os/ScreenShots

[Sunny Rabbiera]

Solaris is good, but it is definitely not a desktop OS.
Solaris is more of a server OS at this point as its not as heavy in hardware support and getting media running it is not that good either.
Though there is Nexenta OS that uses debian packages on a solaris kernel, its currently based on dapper though so its pretty behind in apps.