The Solaris Operating System doesn't need any introduction. It's one of the
most popular UNIX-based operating systems developed by Sun Microsystems for its
SPARC platform as well as the x86 and x86-64 based workstations and servers.
Solaris 10 was released in early 2005, and has undergone many upgrades since
then.
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Starting this month, we'll take you through the world of Solaris and how to
make the most of it. We'll start with a features overview and and how to install
and get started with Solaris on the x86 platform. In later issues, we'll delve
deeper into the key features, and how to configure and use them.
Key features
Compared to previous releases, many significant improvements have been
brought in Solaris 10 in networking, data management, and installation. Plus,
there are many components in it that you'll not find in most other Operating
Systems. Here's a quick overview of those features:
Solaris Dynamic Tracing: short for DTrace, the feature helps developers debug
applications in realtime, and one doesn't need to reboot the system to start the
process.
Solaris Containers: These allow each application in Solaris to run in an
isolated environment just like the usual 'Application virtualization' concept.
Solaris installation menu allows you to choose from a graphical installation or a manual step-by-step, or a simple command line based installation |
Predictive Self Healing: A feature with which the system recovers itself
automatically in case of any fault in software or hardware.
Solaris Zettabyte File System: ZFS is the file system in Solaris 10, which
has many good features like an end-to-end checksum for all data, better
performance, higher scalability, and much more.
Solaris Trusted Extensions: A new feature in Solaris 10, which separates data
security policies from data ownership.
Installing Solaris 10
We've given an ISO of Solaris 10 on this month's 'PCQXtreme' DVD. Burn it on
a DVD and boot any x86 system from it. We suggest you have at least 512 MB RAM
and 7 GB of free hard drive space on the system.
You can choose to install the complete Solaris OS or use it as a server for developers or end users, in which case users would login remotely as thin clients and use it |
The installation of Solaris is initiated by Grub and unlike other OSs, there
are more manual steps involved in it. Like Linux distro installations, Solaris
also gives two installation options: graphical and text modes. For selecting the
graphical mode choose the 'Solaris Interactive' option, else press 'F2' to
install in text mode.
Next select the language you want to use during the installation and click on
'Next.' An installation program welcome screen greets you, showing the list of
information that will be collected from you during the installation process and
in the next step you will see a Solaris 10 welcome screen. Having two welcome
screens in an installation process is something undesirable and could be easily
integrated to reduce the number of steps.
Apart from all the server class apps for managing different services you can also find regular office apps like StarOffice, mail client, web browser, etc |
Next you have to choose the action to be performed after the installation is
complete: automatically restart and eject the media or complete the process
manually. Doing manually is better because any ways you have to remove the DVD
from the drive to prevent it from restarting the installation. Select the media
you will be installing from, which in our case is DVD. Other options are CD or
over the network.
The remaining installation steps are pretty much similar to any other OS
installation. You have to accept the license agreement, select from default or
custom installation, or even a 'non-networked' option, in which the machine will
not have any networking capabilities.
Then you can choose to assign the OS an IP or take it from a nearby DHCP
server running on your network. If you're assigning it an IP yourself, then the
OS will automatically detect all the network cards in the machine. You'll then
have to manually enter the IP address, subnet mask, and card name for each
network card. You'll then have to give a machine name, after which it asks
whether you want to enable IPv6. If your network has support for it, then enable
the same.
Finally, it shows you a 'ready to install' screen with a summary of what you
selected for installation, layout of the HDD, file system, etc. Click on
'Install Now' button to start the installation. Once the installation is
completed, and you'll be shown a Terminal screen. Simply type '#reboot' on this
terminal to reboot the system.
Remove the DVD and reboot. Your Solaris 10 system is ready to be configured.
Post Installation
Once the installation is done, Solaris automatically boots into its GUI,
giving you a normal login and splash screen. Interestingly, Solaris 10 contains
both server as well as desktop applications like StarOffice 7, Gimp, and the
usual web browser, mail client, etc.
Getting used to configuring and using Solaris will take some time, and we'll
talk about it in more detail in the n ext issue.