Very newbie question here about Sun Solaris 9. I'm downloading the images right now and very happy in trying a new OS soon. These questions probably was asked before, but I did not find it with the search button... If so is the case, please point me to a link. Thanks!.

- How different and how similar is Linux and Solaris? I mean, talking about hardware.. I've a nvidia Geforce and nvidia provides drivers to both Linux and BSD OS, but would that work under Solaris?.

- How different and how similar is the console commands? And how compatible is Solaris running Linux applications?. I mean, it has gcc, so that would compile a bunch of stuff. But how about WineX, wine...

- How about Desktop environments? KDE, Flux? What is it on Solaris. I'm used to make ugly buggy programs using gtk libraries, will that work?

- Speed? Does Solaris is used faster then Linux?

- Dual boot? Does it use Lilo, grub or any other Linux bootloader? Is it possible to dualboot with Solaris? What kinda of partitions(EXT2, EXT3...) does it use?

I know those questions are quite boring, but after tried about 20 Linux distributions, I kinda got a bit tired . I have just a pretty special interest in Suns, since I use Java often and like it a lot, so I am willing to try out Solaris, but a little help would not hurt right? .

Oh yeah, I've search all over the net with similar questions, but it all returned answers about running apache and other stuff. I practically wanted to use Solaris as a Java Dev Platform, and desktop if possible (that would include games and hardware acceleration ).

Any tips would be immensely helpful.

Thanks a lot in advance!

P.S: it's to be used in a x86 architecture and my favorite distro is Slackware, so I'm not afraid of consoles .

http://www.solaris-x86.org/ will answer most of your questions.
I am multi-booting Solaris with Lilo and just learning it myself.
Good Luck.

Hi,

I'm trying to work out how to deal with Solaris 9 x86 since 3 days with little success and growing frustration.

The positive thing is that it seems there are lots of people who are using Solaris.
But to me using Solaris seems to be like driving a tank backwards right after learnig to drive a car. 8-(

I have read about 140 hit in "google groups" till I figured out how to get my NIC (RTL8319) going. 8-(
Lots of story about similar problems but no real solution....

I would not expect "Nvidia" drivers to work with Solaris, but *please* prove me wrong.
Besides dozens of drivers for antique "Tseng" and "Trident" cards (2MB) there is *one* for all Nvidia cards that only produces 1200x1024 in a usable quality in my case (19"CRT). 8-(

Sun provies the bourn shell: no history, no command completion, weak scripting, ...
But there is "korn" and "C-shell" I think. And you can add "bash" later.

Desktop is CDE, looks like XFCE only *much* worse, and also Gnome 2.0, which I have not tried till now.

Dual boot? Guess what: Solaris just ate my w2k. At least Linux is still working and the crappy W98 too. Well, it would have been *very* usefull to have a *recent* backup of the masterbootrecord and all bootsectors at hand before playing with fire.
But it should work if you apply *great* care!

Solaris is a "Unix" so it uses "Unix File System" (ufs) ;-)
Linux maybe can read it, but I still have not figured out how.
Eventually Solaris can read ext2, but it seems to be recommended to use FAT(!) for data exchange. 8-(
Extreme Caution: "ufs" has the same partition type as linux swap, so "knoppix" or any other live system may think it is swapspace and ruins it!
And Solaris needs a primary partition to put its filesystem in.

Wheelmouse? Not with CDE, so it seems.

Well I'm a bit frustrated, but if you have more luck please write about it.
On installation Solaris refused the second and third CD at fist, but after aborting they were read later without any problems.
Ah, free software (Software Companion CD) is installed, but it seems to me the path is not set to use them out of the box. (KDE, Fluxbox, XEmacs, ...)

Documentation:
http://docs.sun.com/
http://www.unixguide.net/sun/
http://www.techgirl-net.com/
http://sun.drydog.com/faq/
http://bhami.com/rosetta.html
http://www.sunhelp.org/
http://solaris-x86.org/
http://www.SolarisCentral.org/

Forums:
http://www.tek-tips.com/gthreadminde...lev3/20/pid/60
http://www.computing.net/solaris/wwwboard/wwwboard.html
http://www.bsdforums.org/forums/foru...php?forumid=28

Newsgroups:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=d...p.unix.solaris
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=d...p=comp.sys.sun

Dual boot:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+Solaris.html
http://multiboot.solaris-x86.org/


At least, a happy new year to all

(Frustrated) Pollyanna

Thanks a lot for the great posts 2damncommon and Pollyanna!!!

It's good to see that I am not alone and that you all had the same doubts once . Well, as I knew it should happen, something went bad downloading the images under Windows during the night(I've very little space left at C:, and the temp files are at C:\Documents and Settings... bla bla...) so I'm downloading it again.... thumbs down for Windows...

Well, so far, Solaris sounds pretty scary. But I'll try it out into a spare box first, an old Dell 400 MHZ and see how it goes. The cool thing about trying out a new OS is that feeling about "How this works, or what does that do?". You know, first time I've tried Linux, Mandrake it was, and a long time ago. It came freely with a magazine and in the magazine had instructions about how to install it. In the magazine, they show a nice well defined penguin similar to the windows environment during the installation, when my install showed an all ugly scary DOS like Penguin... Indeed, I could not boot that computer at all . And at those times, I was not so wise under Windows either, so it was really an adventure. Well, let's see how Solaris goes. When the install is finished I will stick around this forum more. I believe we all can move forward with Solaris, with a little effort.

Once again thanks all

And happy new year for everybody too

i haven't tried since i got the "free" $25 version 7.1. it was like taking a
huge step backwards. I have since heard it referred to a "Slowaris" on
x86 anyway. I had to read and follow a 25 page document on how to
setup a modem and ppp connection.
and it's install screwed up my partition table where my other operating
systems wouldn't boot. i had my partition table printed out, so i was able
to reeenter everything by hand.

oh yeah, i had a bunch of operating systems installed at the time, and
had a tar.gz file on a windows partition, and extracted it into many
different operating systems, writing down the time it took. it was very
interesting to me. keep in mind these are just specific to a partitcular
athlon system maybe 4? years ago. but these results are nuts.
anyway, these were all reading a ~150 meg tar.gz file with hundreds
of files in it from a fat32 filesystem, and writing it to the filesystem
below.
i was comparing them for my own use, to see which would be fastest
for doing certain things.



solaris 3m23s
linux 1m 0s -sync option on
openbsd 57s
freebsd 24s -softupdates on i think
linux-1 14.7s 2 different linux scores
linux-2 9.57s -this one probably -noatime
netbsd 52.88s
netbsd-2 18.5s -newer version with my chipset supported
beos 4m15s -befs file system
qnx 43.15s -fat32 filesystem
openbsd 37.35 -newer openbsd with chipset supported
qnx 1m06s -qnx native filesystem

Hi to all

I'm sorry if my report scared you, I am only frustrated.
There was a recent article on www.osnews.com with the bottom line:

<cite>
"Ironically, Solaris x86 is now where Linux was 4 years ago: Great for open-source applications and on a limited set of hardware, but commercial enterprise applications are few and far between."
</cite>

Ah, Solaris: Browser ist Netscape 4.78 ;-)

If you have enough HD space and know how to backup and restore a masterbootrecord there is little danger. 8-)
On the other side you should be able to backup the mbr *after* you changed some partitions. 8-(

You should at least read one or two howtos concerning multiboot with solars. ;-)

But now I have to reanimate at least one of my two w2ks, before I can try to get rid of the Solaris bootmanager.
(Why you have only one bootmanager, when you can have Solaris boot w2k bootmanger, which boots grub or lilo!)

I don't think Solaris ate them literally but they terminated themselves on differnent disks with different failures after changing hardware!
That's timesaving: no user needed, w2k makes it faults by themself. ;-)

After that, perhaps I should give FreeBSD 5.2 a chance when it's ready. Only Linux is not enough.


Happy new year to all

Pollyanna

Hi to all

this really blew it: I had to disable APIC in the BIOS to get my NIC work (see some threads below) and now W2k refuses to work.
Workaround by MS: reinstall W2k! 8-(
Thank you very much.

The time I invested in *solely* get the NIC work with Solaris it normally takes me to install two times Linux and on Windows (or the other way around). 8-(

Solaris *must* be the OS of the year.

So I get rid of the Solaris bootloader at least. ;-)

This is the worst christmas for a long time.
Perhaps I should get a life?


Unhappy Pollyanna

Hello again fellows!

Well, I'm finally with Solaris 9.0 up and running. I've many things to say about Solaris as my first impact. Please remember, I've been playing with Solaris for 30 minutes, and this is what I have to say, both positive and negative...

Installation:

The installation went pretty smooth actually. Way easier then many distros. It took a huge amount of time to make the install though. I've used the automatic partition system and now my HD is pretty weird, with paths I've never seem before.

Hardware detection:

It's pretty bad. My monitor was wrongly identified, my USB devices weren't either, nor my sound card which is auto installed with practically all Linux distributions I've tried so far. It's a Zoltrix, and even at the box, it's stands Linux compatible (not often peoples write it... as they did not at Unreal Tournament 2003 even having a Linux installer on it... ) and the worse is... I've no idea how to start to making they work, the command line is week, the tools obscures... So that means, no Internet for me with Solaris, since I did not find a way to configure my network :S.

One thing very positive to say is, as being SunsOS, Solaris is very good for Java programming right out of the box. I've fired up vi and type a simple Java HelloWorld and with javac I've compiled it and with java HelloWorld I could run it. Very neat... as a Java student myself, I've found it pretty useful and simple to do...

Gcc were not installed, and I thought it should by default. I cannot mount my CD - Rom device either... nor I could find what it could be at /dev. Weird...

About the CDE, I liked it a lot. Remembers me WindowMaker, somehow... Gnome works pretty well too, as expected...

Now, about the console auto-completition (or ratter saying, the total lack of it) is pretty lame... Even Win2K and XP has command line autocompletition (not by default though, but capable of it with registries hacks).

Well, time for reading. Go in to:

http://solaris-x86.org/

There you can see a link to download an e-Book. It's free, but the author asks for peoples to buy it, if you can afford. A noble attitude of him I might say.

To sum up, I do, liked Solaris, but it's another huge learning curve. And so was Linux. I have to say that I did not understand what Sun wants with Solaris. At first sight, it looks just as easy to use as Mandrake, for example, but with an even easier installation. You cannot go wrong choosing the packages, because you cannot choose any . You simple choose an installation type. But at the end, it turns out to be a powerful Java development platform with Vi by default... But still disappoints experts used with console auto-completition... Strange.

Now I understand your frustration Pollyanna. But I will read that book and see what trouble I can cause in my computer with Solaris lol

Thanks again folks!

yeah. there used to be a solaris site where you could download stuff
like gcc and bash and such, but i can't remember where.
most shells have auto-complete, but they work different ways, and you
might have to enable it. and you probably need gnu's ls so you can
have colors.

Thanks whansard!

That would be very handy. I must say, I'm a bit jealous with the amount of OS'es you've installed there . Colors would be nice too. It feelis like I'm working at the very early days of DOS so far...

I've found a good command though:

sys-unconfig

This will unconfigure the machine and when you boot, you've the chance to reconfigure everything, from mouse and keybord up to the display and network. Easier then search after tools. Now my network is setup, but it turns out that my network card ain't supported by Solaris. In fact, very very few are... Amazingly enough, I still could not mount my cdrom... kinda funny really
Apparently, modprobe is not a valid command either. So that reduce even more my tools to loading modules for scanner and sound card, or even joystick...

Still looking for basic files as XFConfig, fstab... None of them seems to exist, or to be placed where it used to be. Solaris is not Linux, and I've to perhaps understand it first

Could anyone identify your CD-Rom device and mount it? I've created a folder at /mnt/cdrom, but I have no idea what to link to it, since at my /dev, there's a bunch of strange things, but not cdrom .

Is all of your hardware in the list of supported devices? Sun does provide a relatively accurate "hardware compatibility list" to check against before you start. If it's not on the list, it's time to start looking for third party support.

Hi Megaman X

Out of the Box there is a "automounter" running: if I put a CD in I have to wait a little and Solaris mounts it automagicaly and opens a filemanager.
The "/etc/fstab" of Solaris is called /etc/vfstab.
I don't have do mount manually, but if you have to do so you maybe look at the Solaris documentation:
http://docs.sun.com/db/doc/817-2874/6migoi9rs?a=view
This should also be on your HD right now. ;-)
The X-Window-System is *not* "XFree86", though available for Solaris x86, but something called "Xsun", or similar. So there is little use for looking after "XFConfig". ;-)

gcc, bash, tcpdump and many other GNU things are available on the "Solaris 9 Companion CD" or from
http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris...are/index.html
but it seems they are not automatically included into the "path". You and maybe I have to do some work on this.

You will have to read the E-book within Linux or Windows, because there is no "Acrobat Reader" included or available from "Adobe" for Solaris x86. 8-(
I found an antique version (4.05) somewhere on the "Google Groups" and
"xpdf" from the "Companion CD" does the job too.

If your NIC has a Realtek RTL8139 chipset there is a tutorial on http://solaris-x86.org/ but I had further problems with the IRQ-handling of my mainboard.

Now my monitor goes crazy when I leave X and go to commandline for reboot or poweroff. "Out of Range" is shurely bad news from the monitor. 8-(

I have to setup my "new" w2k. Because I`m dumb as hell. 8-(


Bye

Pollyanna

Hi everybody
I'm working with Solaris at Univerity on a Blade and with Linux at home on an Athlon 2100. Sadly I have to say, that I can't recommend anybody to change from linux to solaris. Even if it works perfect, the gui (CDE) looks like linux did five years ago. You have to use a terminal all the time to start programs, you cannot copy or move files by drag and drop, the symbols just look horrible (for todays standards). It is, from my point of view, much worse than windowmaker (which is provided also by sun as far as i know) on linux. The only advantage of solaris is that it runs rock solid on the blade, but as I read in this post, this isn't like that on Intel Systems.
So, if you like the Sun feeling, try WindowMaker on Linux and you'll be happy (I am though)
Regards
Maddie

Nice Pollyanna, very nice!. You are becoming a Solaris specialist . I saw your thread few post bellow configuring your network. Congratz . And thanks for the links as well. I've just downloaded that companion CD as you suggested. I might try those by tonight or tomorrow. The good news is that so far, Solaris is damn stable. Although, I cannot call the console with ctrl+alt+F<1-7> as in Linux. That's a bit negative, because if X crashes, it might take the hole system down with it(?). That's why I'm not using Gnome, since Nautilus is quite buggy... from my previous Linuces experiences at least CDE is sweet(I know you all hate it because looks old, but I love old desktops. When I watch Buffy - The Vampire Slayer series when Willow, her friend, uses those old desktop environments I think that it looks so cool)

Amazingly enough, I could not create a successful user yet. I actually did, with the useradd (or was it adduser... lol) but the /home/user is not created as I wanted. I then created as root a folder, but it fails miserably because the user do not have permission to use that folder. I then used a chmod but it did not help. At the tools, Administration, you can do stuff as create and edit users, but always return an error saying the "/home/user was not yet created". Funny.

As you said, the Cd is mounted automatically. Although, where the the Cd is being pointed/mounted at is hidden from me :S. So I have no idea how to reach the cdrom via console...

Though, the documentation that you've pointed me looks neat and many problems might be solved using it As creating users and stuff.

I know the way Solaris is, won't compete with Linux, but it's damn cool to trying something new out. Indeed, as long as it's stable... and so is Solaris.
As mad4linux suggested, I've put WindowMaker in my Slackware box. Kinda cool. It has been a long time since I last played with WindowMaker. Thanks mate.

As stickman asked, my hardware is pretty difficult to identify. Half of my computer has inbuit stuff, as sound card, network, video... The sound card I've replaced for a new one. The thing is, this computer worked perfectly since I've tried Redhat 6.2, which is very dated, but detected everything just fine (the amount of video RAM, inbuilt ATI 4 megas, had to be changed on the XFree, but that was all I've got to do..).

Solaris is getting bigger though. I've some friends working as system adm. using Solaris, so it's always good to get the hang of another OS. Looks cool on the resume at least

Getting better with Solaris.

Thanks for you all who replied here, my Solaris now has gcc, g++, is capable of running KDE, WindowMaker(haven't figured out where to change to add them to the login prompt yet, but are installed), Gnome, CDE, and runs GTK and QT applications just fine. It also can install RPM's now. I've installed some applications from the Companion CD and I've to say. It's 10x better now. With bash and rxvt I've got the auto-completition function.

Vim runs with syntax highlighting just perfectly. Very nice. As some here have already said, the programs installed from this cd are not automatically linked. That means, if you install vim or xmms and then type at the prompt vim or xmms, it won't work. I've tried to create a symbolic link from the executable of vim, now installed at /opt/sfw/bin to /usr/bin. The link (ln -s) was created, but the program did not run. I've tried a few more combinations and nothing. I then, copied the vim exectuable to /usr/bin and now I can run vim from anywhere I if I wish to do so... If Pollyana have not done it, give it a shot . Maybe it's the work around that we need to use. However, some questions:

Questions:

1 - Is it possible to create a link to /usr/bin from an executable? Which syntax would be correct? I'm trying, for example, ln -s vim /usr/bin (indeed, from /opt/swf/bin, where vim is...). The link is created correctly, but the program cannot run.

2 - I've tried copying some more executables as I did above with xmms, gimp, and few others. All of them worked. How safe is coping the entire executable ratter then creating links? Because, if it's safe, could I simple move everything I wanted from that path to /usr/bin?

3 - gcc compiler question. It works perfectly, the problem is that it's not where it's used to be. As all other applications, gcc is at /opt/swf/gcc-3. Gcc is fully installed, as gcj, g++... I've done some Java and C Hello world and them both compiled and run fine. gcc is a trick compiler. I don't think I could copy the executable to the /usr/bin, since gcc has many important directories/headers as bin, lib...

I've to say, I'm pretty happy with Solaris now. Just few things holding me back, but only because the hardware I have in this isn't so friendly. Other then that, I've to say that Solaris is a good distro to peoples who needs a Unix like system and do not use Linux to play games with, since nvidia hardware accelerations does not seem to work on Solaris, neither winex as far as I know. Give it a shot peoples