quikchange: Solaris 10

Tony (

quikchange) wrote,
@ 2006-12-01 06:45:00

Current mood:	annoyed
Current music:	Shasta - Kobayashi
Entry tags:	geeky, vmware

Solaris 10
After a relatively painless experience upgrading my Ubuntu desktop from Dapper to Edgy, I was feeling a little adventurous. I've also been curious about the recent release of Solaris 10 so when I heard that we now have a feature-complete build of VMware Tools for Solaris, I decided to try installing it inside a VM. I copied the 3 gig DVD ISO of 64-bit Solaris 10 onto my local disk, created a new VM in Workstation and booted it off the DVD image.

The installer began by asking me the usual questions (language, timezone, network config, etc.) and then move onto package selection. This is where it became confusing. There are 3 distinct stages of package selection and considerable overlap amongst them! The 3rd stage gave me ample opportunity to mess around with the choices I'd made earlier. What a usability nightmare! It reminded me of using dselect back in 2000. With all the emphasis Sun put on making Gnome more usable a few years ago, you'd think some of that would have permeated to the Solaris installer team...

The other user-experience gaffe in the installation process was that, despite having asked me for the language, timezone and network settings at the onset, upon booting Solaris for the 1st time I was required to enter all this information a 2nd time (in a completely different UI). It's a lot to tolerate for the chance to play with Dtrace and ZFS.

(Post a new comment)

	jstew 2006-12-01 04:53 pm UTC (link)
	I don't know... ZFS is pretty exciting! (Reply to this)

	Solaris 10 louspringer 2006-12-01 06:43 pm UTC (link)
	I hope you stick with it! Besides ZFS and dtrace you've already mentioned, there's SunRay and Zones which are truly cool virtualization technologies. This is a blatant plug, but you can read about some of the (I think cool) things you can do with SunRay, Synergy, Solaris !0, Ubuntu, iSCSI, VMware and Windows XP at my blog: http://blog.louspringer.com. (Reply to this)(Thread)

Re: Solaris 10

quikchange
2006-12-01 08:27 pm UTC (link)

Your blog is pretty interesting :-)

I had a lot of trouble with the Solaris install though; it took a long time before I could see a Gnome desktop on the screen :-(

While ZFS, Dtrace, et al are pretty sweet, I don't understand why vi (not to mention a shell with command history) isn't part of the failsafe Solaris environment...

But I think you know what I mean ;-)

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

Re: Solaris 10

louspringer
2006-12-01 09:48 pm UTC (link)

You can get to bash in that environment with "/a/bin/bash". Your "regular' filesystem is mounted on "/a" in that failsafe boot. As for vi, your right, no visual edit, apparently there is no "addressable cursor support". You can start it, but its just "ed" I think.

If you just want command line login, you can find that on the "Options" drop down of the regular X login prompt. And there's always ssh. Its installed by default. You'll usually need to login as another user and "su" to root unless you reconfigure ssh. I should mention there's *another* cool feature of Solaris 10 called "roles" which is "preferable" alternative to "su". I don't know much about it, though.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	Re: Solaris 10 quikchange 2006-12-01 11:00 pm UTC (link)
	Thanks for the tip about bash. SSH would probably have been more useful if the installer had been able to configure my NIC. But I've gotten past that now and am currently trying to figure out why root doesn't have the right to chmod /home... (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

Re: Solaris 10
(Anonymous)
2006-12-01 11:16 pm UTC (link)

This has something to do with the default way autohome is used in large production environments. I never bothered to figure this out (I'm not a systems admin). I put my home directories in the /export/home tree, which I is the typical location in Solaris.

Maybe the idea is to use local loop mounts on the local filesystem, and remote NFS mounts on the remote filesystem to mount "/export/home/myuser" to "/home/muser" on whatever machine you are logged into? I'm probably all wet on this supposition since I seem to recall at work my roving home directory is in /export/home/louis1 or some such.

BTW, if you are still feeling adventurous after all of this, be sure to try Solaris Express, aka Nevada or Solaris 11. Its beta, but the user interface is subtly but noticeably nicer, and is packaged with Thunderbird and Firefox.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	Re: Solaris 10 quikchange 2006-12-01 11:26 pm UTC (link)
	Ooh, Solaris 11! Maybe it'll let me use bash as the default shell for root ;-) I grok what you said about home dirs. Thanks for the explanation. (Reply to this)(Parent)

Solaris 10
(Anonymous)
2006-12-01 07:38 pm UTC (link)

Check out the installation community on opensolaris.org. We are working on a new installer for Solaris and have data on this site about our proposed direction. I hear your pain. In fact the whole Solaris install team hears your pain and is actively working to fix the issues you see.

I am curious about being asked again for the language, timezone and network settings. That shouldn't happen.

Sarah Jelinek
sarah.jelinek@sun.com - Solaris Install team

(Reply to this)

	zedinbed 2006-12-01 07:59 pm UTC (link)
	Is there anything in Edgy that is definitely worth the update? I am thinking of moving full-time to Ubuntu or Fedora. I like both of them enough for this to be a hard decision. :p (Reply to this)(Thread)

Ubuntu

louspringer
2006-12-01 09:53 pm UTC (link)

Ubuntu rocks, if that's the choice! I can't point to any particular feature, but the whole thing really seems to hang together well. A world-class systems administrator I know whose tried them all turned me on to it.

I've got an iSCSI target, an NFS server, a DHCP server and a DNS server running on it on an old 400Mhz Dell box that was gathering dust. I'm pretty happy with it.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	Re: Ubuntu louspringer 2006-12-01 09:55 pm UTC (link)
	I forgot, I've got a samba server and a cheap firewire card and some old firewire disks on it, too. It all just worked. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	quikchange 2006-12-01 10:54 pm UTC (link)
	What finally prompted me to upgrade from Dapper was the availability of an outstanding IDE called GNAT Programming Studio but Ubuntu is far and away my favourite Linux distro, although even Suse is better than Fedora. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	Solaris install improvements are coming (Anonymous) 2006-12-01 08:28 pm UTC (link)
	Sun completely understands that Solaris installation is a lot less usable than it should be. If you wander on over to http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/install/ you'll find that we're working on addressing it. Specific comments and suggestions would be welcomed. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	Re: Solaris install improvements are coming quikchange 2006-12-01 10:57 pm UTC (link)
	I've extremely glad to hear that it's being actively improved. I will mosey on over to that page over the weekend and see if I can help :) (Reply to this)(Parent)

	jfpoole 2006-12-01 11:20 pm UTC (link)
	Sun had to send me a dual-core Opteron box in order for me to even try using Solaris seriously. The install process was just so awful that I gave up half-way through when I was installing it under VMWare. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	quikchange 2006-12-01 11:27 pm UTC (link)
	Well, at least they seem to be actively working on that. And now that Solaris is open, I might even be able to help :) (Reply to this)(Parent)

	morethanreal 2006-12-02 04:12 am UTC (link)
	But you know... Dtrace is going to be in Leopard when it comes out. Maybe what you need to do is switch :) (Reply to this)(Thread)

	You clearly don't know Tony (Anonymous) 2006-12-03 05:48 am UTC (link)
	He's already an avid mac user so he doesn't need to switch... just pointing this out because I was just going to post about dtrace in Leopard and you had already posted about it (Reply to this)(Parent)

	quikchange 2006-12-03 12:38 pm UTC (link)
	I fully intend to purchase Leopard when it is released but, unless you are privy to insider info, Solaris remains the only way to play with ZFS. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	morethanreal 2006-12-03 07:20 pm UTC (link)
	Ah... You know I can't talk about it :) (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	quikchange 2007-03-23 03:12 pm UTC (link)
	Apparently you didn't need to: ZFS in Leopard. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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