Had a chance to install Sun Solaris 10 on a Solaris machine today with a 64-bit AMD Opteron processor. The machine came installed with Windows XP 64 bit (first time seeing it too) but we didn’t have the password to access the system.
The installation was quite straightforward with its auto-boot GUI installation wizard, although it asked damn lots of questions from network settings to locale BEFORE asking the user to assign disk space for the installation. (imagine the situation when you configured everything but did not have enough disk space for it.
The end result of it is a unix system (with /etc /var /bin), and two GUI apps (CDE – Common Desktop Environment & Java Desktop) which are Windows-like GUI systems. The CDE resembles more like X-Win while Java Desktop mimics Windows closer (with a “Start” button and taskbar). Configuration is still as weird as normal Unix, since I’m not that Unixy.
The weirdest part was before installation we used a “self-burnt” DVD to try install Solaris 10 x86 Update 2. The CD-ROM boots and stucks at “Loading stage2…”. Google say its a known bug when installing from SCSI DVD-ROM drives but ours is IDE (I think). Popping the CD out throws us into GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader), but we can’t start the install wizard despite trying those “boot” and “kernel” commands.
In the end we resorted to using an “older” original version of Sun Solaris 10 x86, also DVD.
Tidbits:
– ifconfig = ipconfig
– DNS nameservers is set in etc/resolv.conf