[geeks] opensolaris! Where do we start :)

[Mark Benson]

On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 10:41 +0100, Frank Van Damme wrote:

> I got hold of another couple of sun ultra10 boxen, and I thought this
> would be a good opportunity to learn something about Solaris. I
> installed SXCE on one of them, and I thought about trying that
> "Indiana" thing on another, but it seems to be only x86 atm.  I
> thought Solaris was supposed to be a Sparc operating system in the
> first place.

Just to clear things up, There are 2 Sun 'offically endorsed' versions
of Solaris that are considered 'current'.

OpenSolaris (what used to be Indiana), which  is a open-source,
community driven verion of Solaris

Solaris 10, which is free-to-download but closed source.

OpenSolaris is more 'Linux-like' (a bad thing IMHO) than Solaris 10. It
is x86/x64 only, no SPARC support (which is also crap as it's lighter
weight and would run well on UltraSPARC II/III hardware). For SPARC you
are stuck with the offcial 'Solaris 10' and any other community SPARC
OSs you can find.

> So, I guess I'll try out SXCE first. But I don't know the first thing
> about it and I'm having a bit of trouble finding a good starting
> point. So, what gentle introduction does a Solaris newbie like me need
> to read?

I was taught the ins and outs by people here and a friend who is a
fellow Sun and UNIX enthusiast. I also did a lot of Google searching and
and fooling around in my spare time. Best way to learn is to do. :)

-- 
Mark Benson <md.benson at gmail.com>