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]
