Paid my 12 quid, downloaded the three ISOs, made my CDs.

First platform: Dell OptiPlex GX110, used to test integrity of CDs. If only I could have used this; all hardware identified and supported, graphical install ahoy!

Unfortunately, it's one of my test Windows servers so I couldn't zap it :\\

Target system:

Athlon XP 1800+, 512MB RAM, GeForce4 Ti4200, 2 x ATA disks, 10G primary disk, 40G secondary disk (Linux).

Boot off CD, configuration assistant runs, it sees my hard disk! Hurrah! (I had a bad experience with Solaris 7 x86 and a HighPoint HPT366 disk controller many moons ago).

[snip 2 hours of dicking around with disks to ensure that Solaris wouldn't have to coexist with Linux swap partitions on the same disk and copying 5G of Unreal Tournament 2003 and Quake III Arena to another disk with the unbearably slow BusyBox cp]

Basic hardware identified, impressed to observe USB mouse lighting up.

OK, second-stage install.

kdmconfig identifies precisely jack squat about my video setup. Attempts to use nvidia driver (only good up to GF3, apparently) and generic 800x600 drivers fail.

Proceed installation in text mode, simple question and answer sessions to configure things like network, software selections (I installed "everything") and whatnot.

System reboots, grub has been wiped out (not to worry, contingency plan in place: boot off Debian CD, "rescue root=/dev/hdb1 single", grub-install /dev/hda after editing /boot/grub/menu.lst to add Solaris), we've got a text-mode UNIX.

Plus points at this stage; bash, ssh, bzip, and friends all installed by default. I've been on Linux too long to be productive with any shell other than bash. Network configuration is manual but straightforward (place default gateway IP address in /etc/defaultrouter, nodename in /etc/nodename, and so on).

I'm on the net.

While the abortive attempts at kdmconfig were ongoing, I located the XFree86 video drivers and porting kit; this enables you to use XF86 video drivers with the Xsun server, negating the need to dink around replacing Sun's X11 system with XFree86.

Anyone contemplating investigating Solaris on x86 needs to have this URL embedded into their brain:

[link|http://www.tools.de/solaris|http://www.tools.de/solaris]

Right now, I'm gasping because the only editor on the system is vi, which is shit, and I need emacs. This is not a problem, as Sun do a software bonus pack with all sorts of goodies, including emacs. Installation is tedious but simple.

Sound driver was installed from the above URL, as I have a SBLive which, on Linux, I drive with the emu101k driver.

So, we're up and at'em. CDE is just as ugly but functional as it ever was, but superseding the admintool of old is a Java (Swing) Management Console. This provides a sensible interface to such tasks as user management, roles, storage management, and other assorted bits and pieces. I created myself and set my shell to be /bin/bash.

The default browser on the system is Netscape 4.78, which is predictably awful. Thankfully, there's a handy-dandy tool called "pkg-get" which automates the process of downloading and installing Solaris packages and their dependencies.

pkg-get -i mozilla :-)

So far, I'm reasonably impressed; installation could have been a real bear, and it's obvious that the text-mode install hasn't received any real UI lovin'. I've done installs with the graphical installer as well and it's much better, giving you greater control over the process and is a lot less confusing.

I'm still refreshing my memory over the Solaris filesystem layout (Linux, it ain't.) and The Sun Way, but I'll stick with this for a little while. Next challenge is getting fontconfig and freetype2 going :-)