Recently, I discovered that Sun was releasing single-license
versions of their Solaris Unix-alike operating system (this may not be
news to you, but it was news to me). And I had my web-server and
another machine on my LAN which I needed to re-install Linux on (for
various reasons). So I decided to give Solaris a shot. I used to play
with Solaris quite a lot back in my hacking days, so I figured it would
be a nostalgic trip for me to actually have it running on one of my
machines.
Downloading the ISO's was easy and fast - I can say that much
for Sun. They provided a nice Java download manager that took a lot of
the sting out of downloading a series of several-hundred-megabyte
files.
The target machine was a Pentium 200, with 128 megs of RAM, two
PCI network cards, and 4 drives (6 gigs/6 gigs/3 gigs/CD-ROM). I had
long ago removed sound-cards and anything else, because these machines
were designed to be relatively head-less.
My first attempt ended in utter, abysmal failure. Solaris would
recognize the second two drives, but not the first two, and the problem
stumped me for a few days (in fact, all weekend). I finally was able to
determine that during the install process, Solaris -really- wanted the
CD-ROM to be on the primary IDE channel. I knew that the hardware was
old, but standard, and this put a kink in my plans.
Figuring that I could easily add-in the devices on the secondary
IDE channel later, I swapped one of the drives and the CD-ROM. The
solution seemed easy enough.
The install continued, but this time it ended at what would
later become the terminal failure. It would hang up solid right after
it detected the video card and the mouse. Multiple approaches to this
only produced very different points that Solaris would hang. Finally, I
fell back to a text-only install, but Solaris still insisted at one
point on detecting the video card and the mouse, and it would continue
to hang.
This problem continued until I determined that either my
hardware wasn't compatible with Solaris, or that Solaris was dropping
the ball in detecting my hardware. However, I'll never know for sure
because my next step was to pull out the Mandrake 9 CD's and install
Linux, which, I might add, went flawlessly.
So, my review of Solaris is stilted, and I don't intend on
trying it again until I can use it on a more modern machine. This
release of Solaris is supposed to spark off Solaris as a serious
competitor to Linux, but unless they support older, legacy hardware to
some minimal degree, I don't personally see it as a contender.
David Jackson
