On Sun, 15 Jun 2008, James Tuttle wrote:

> Trying to port my Linux experience to Solaris 10 makes my brain bleed
> some days.  I'd recommend, and this is probably too onerous for the
> original poster, installing OpenSolaris in a virtual machine if the
> installation route seems viable.  The differences between Solaris (or
> #@$%@# Solaris!, as we affectionately call it) and Linux are pretty
> great.  However, installing a distro inside VirtualBox is probably a
> little more advanced than the OP may be prepared for.

I'd completely agree -- for those of you who haven't had to cut your teeth 
on multiple flavors of un*x, you're in for a world of hurt trying to learn 
two at the same time and trying to keep everything straight.

I've had to administer SunOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, picoBSD, Slackware, MacOS 
X and Red Hat ... and have been a user on Tru64, MachTen, HPUX, AIX, IRIX 
and too many BSD and Linux variants to keep track of.  Using them, they're 
all pretty similar ... you just have to adjust your shell & path to make 
everything behave like you're used to, and remember which versions of 'ps' 
and 'tar' are installed.

Administering them, however, is no where near as straightforward -- how do 
you patch it?  Where are the RC scripts stored?  How do you force the 
machine to single user mode?  Which host based firewalls are on by 
default, and how do you configure it?  Where are the mail queues?  What's 
the default MTA?  Is it running Vixie Cron?


If you don't already have a spare sun box sitting around, try checking 
with the CS department and whomever runs your computer centers, and see 
if they have an old box they're getting rid of.  Otherwise, I'd go the 
OpenSolaris route, just as it's going to be the closest to managing a 
Solaris system.

-Joe