I decided to give Solaris a try. Signed up, and downloaded the DVD. Took a fair amount of time I must add, since it comes in 5 parts, which you must cat together yourself. 3.5GB of data takes a while to unzip and cat... Anyways, finally got an ISO to burn down, waited, waited, waited - K3b spat out my DVD, as excited as I was, I shoved the drive shut again, and rebooted. The DVD took a while to boot up, and bugged me with several questions before starting up. Got past all the questions, and it went into X, and the installation process began. Skipped through, as you do, and reached the part where I get to repartition my harddrive. Took a look at my harddrives, selected some free space to partition up, and away it went! It began installing. Took a long long time. Ok, time to reboot. Booted up, GRUB came up on the screen. Solaris, Solaris failsafe, Windows....where is my Linux? I ignored, booted into Solaris, greeted with it loading up X, and asking several more questions for configuration. Ok, ok, next, next, install documentation, next, reboot. Finally the moment I'd waited for since lastnight, my first boot up into Solaris. Came to the GRUB screen again, went into Solaris, watched it load up, and then it stopped. "login:" was what I seen. So I went in as root, expecting it to actually do something. Nadda. No X, and a poor shell to play with. Didn't have a clue what to do, it had my keyboard settings messed up, and there was NO TAB AUTOCOMPLETION! I wasn't happy. Grabbed my nearest Arch Linux CD to recover Lilo and get back into Linux to get on the net and find out what to do. Rebooted, mounted...oh...wait...where is my Linux? That 'Free space' I had wasn't free space. It was my Linux Partition! Nightmare! I am now sitting waiting for xorg and my nvidia drivers to finish downloading, typing this in Links. Oh the joys of trying new things. I'll not be fooled out of Linux anymore! Lessons learned: 1) Make sure you KNOW which partitions are which 2) Don't Mix SATA and IDE drives...or atleast double check before partitioning. 3) Keep your home directory on a seperate partition - Lucky I did this, or I'd have lost a fair amount of work. 4) Don't be tempted by the devil that is Solaris! Anyways, back to getting my system up and running, I think its nearly finished downloading...and I've ran out of stuff to rant at.

I'm using solaris on a pretty old computer as my server, and the gui and all works fine for me.


Although I mainly access it via the console from my windows machine :)


The bootup goes to a console but if you let it wait it goes to the gui after a little bit.

ive tried Solaris on my old laptop, and on my desktop through VMWare. Both failed misrebly.

On the laptop, it booted, i logged in as root, then all of a sudden it decided to start X. Only thing is I hadnt had chance to configure it, so it died, and the hole machine hung. I rebooted, and it dumped me into maintenance mode. Not knowing a clue about what I was doing, i follwed the instructions to clear out of maintenance, and rebooted. Then i got a kernel panic. Into failsafe to restore the boot image, only for it to hang.

Same happened through VMWare, although it hung before i even got to log into the shell.

Bloody solaris, think ill stick to linux!