Solaris (Intel and Sparc) is a rock solid Unix, unlike other proprietary Unix it is available free of charge to download $49.95 for the CD set or $9.95 for the DVD containing SPARC and x86 versions. Sun also make some very affordable hardware these days so why not get the very best out of Solaris with a workstation or laptop.
Solaris 10 is now available and has some great improvements in speed and particularly the desktop, see the Window Managers and Screenshots pages for more details.
To make a worthwhile installation you need to download the Companion CD as well as the 3 installation ISO's, this is also a free download. The downloaded files are zipped iso's, just unzip and burn with Roxio, Nero or similar if you are using Windows or cdrecord from Linux. Sun uses bz2 to compress the disk images, WinRAR will uncompress this format, some of the images may have the extension rr (Rockridge) just change this to iso and (in Roxio) select "Record CD from CD image" from the file menu.
I have the Intel version installed on my old Compaq 166MMX with 80M RAM and the performance was surprisingly decent. The sparc version is installed on my Ultra 60 600MHz 512M and this compares favourably to a much faster Intel box running XP.
The installation is a breeze, providing;
a) You don't want to share the drive with another OS and
b) your hardware is fairly standard and preferably a few years old
Before booting with the Solaris CD it is a good idea to run DOS fdisk to remove any existing partitions and rewrite the mbr with;
fdisk /mbr
Solaris uses the same partition type number as Linux (but not the same filesystem) and leaving old Linux partitions can confuse the installer. Equally if you remove Solaris and want to reinstall Linux use DOS fdisk again to clean up. Solaris makes extremely broken partition tables (at least they appear broken to other OS) and you may find your PC unbootable unless you use a DOS boot disk to wipe the mbr and partition table. There is a HOWTO on dual-booting, but it is not for the faint-hearted. For SPARC machines boot, wait for the memory test then hit stop+a to get to the ok prompt
ok boot cdrom
SPARC only- if you are using a HDD which has not had Solaris previously installed, you may get messages about a "bad magic number", to cure this, during the installation right-click open a new terminal window,
#format
Then choose the "Label" option, yes to continue, and close the terminal, the install will proceed normally and you will not get the error message on reboot.
Once installed you will be presented with the CDE desktop which is stable and has a number of good applications, the first thing you will notice is the high quality fonts. Whilst you will hear a lot of people berate the CDE desktop I am not one of them, Cut/Paste and Drag/Drop works consistently across applications, and it does not look that bad. Star Office integrates well and is worth installing, I found it performed slightly better than the Linux version, although this is purely subjective, a port of OpenOffice is also available.
Installing the extras on the Companion CD is easy, just put in the CD, it will automount and run the installer where you can choose the required packages. The main problem I had was with my old S3 (765) video chip, the installation defaulted to 8 bit colour and I had to hack /etc/openwin/server/etc/OWconfig to make it work with 16 bit. Solaris only supports 8 or 24 bit, if you force it to use 16 bit some applications(including the software installer) will fail to run and produce lots of Java exceptions. The Intel version uses the command
#kdmconfig
to set up the video card, keyboard, mouse and monitor, this can be run (as superuser) anytime to reconfigure the resolution and colour depth, logout to a console first for best results.
Sun have now produced a port of XF86 for Solaris so a lot more video cards are now supported, the 16 bit restrictions still apply however.
For sparc machines the commands for video settings depend on the type of card or chip, for onboard video chips use
#m64config -depth -res
or
#fbconfig -depth -res
the option
#m64config -prconf
after either of the 2 commands will list the resolutions and refresh rates supported by your card, and if you use a Sun Monitor, its' supported options.
Creator cards use
#ffbconfig -res
for 24 bit colour depth use the following depending on the card you have;
Sun Creator 3D(old) #ffbconfig -deflinear true
Sun Creator 3D(new) #ffbconfig -deflinear true -g 1.1
Sun Elite 3D #afbconfig -deflinear true -g 1.1
Sun Expert 3D #fbconfig -deflinear true -g 1.1
PGX32 #pgxconfig -res 1280x1024 -depth 24
Mach_64 #m64config -res 1152x900 -depth 24
To test if you have an old or new Creator 3D card
#/usr/sbin/ffbconfig -propt
If the output of this command contains the phrase "gamma correction" then you have the new card.
Note: When ever you see the # sign used on this site, this denotes a root shell command prompt
There is an excellent FAQ here for Intel and if you want to use Solaris to learn Unix then download the documentation from Sun.