Google should be able to provide you with most info and tutorial pdf guides etc.
Ubuntu one of the most popular Linux operating systems includes a very extensive help manual with search features. Much like the windows help panel. As most of us are learning, some can survive solely using solaris, I however don't and also suggest to new users that they don't either. Really it depends on what you want to use your laptop for, using solaris as your only OS may be fine, but I'm guessing that at school your using windows and any work you do you will want to sync with your laptop and expand on that. You have a number of options when it comes to learning about Unix-like operating systems. Additionally while openSolaris may seem way out of your league, if programming is the career path you want to take than learning about it and other linux systems is highly recommended. The different paths you can take include: 1. Using windows solely. (a bad move by anybodys standards). 2. Using OpenSolaris solely or a Linux distrobution. (which is fine but huge learning curve) 3. Using windows combined with cygwin. Cygwin provides a compatibility layer with windows, the actual install can be anywhere between 700mb, and 3.5gb depending on the amount of linux software you want to run with it. While cygwin is great for tool it doesn't really force you to learn things about linux apart from running man. The manual command. 4. Using windows combined with virtual machines. Or linux combined with virtual machines. Installing virtualbox or any of the other virtual software(vmare etc) will allow you to install different operating systems and learn how they work, over the top of another operating system, these virtual machines just open up in a window and you can make the size of the window any size you like. A good setup would include: a) OpenSolaris, b) ms windows, c) ubuntu/debian d) freeBSD e) others. Personally I find this to be the best option as a newbie. As if you make a huge mistake it doesn't matter too much because you can just delete the VM, and make a new one. 5. Dual boot. Setting up your system to dual boot may seem a bit daunting, and it is when you are unfamiliar with gparted and other partition applications. What you do is partition you hardrive say into 4 sections. lets say we have a 200gb hardrive and want to install MS windows on the first partition, Linux Mint on the second partition and OpenSolaris on the 3rd and the forth will be a very small partition for swap. most linux distrobutions include a swap partition which pretends to be extra ram, so say you only have 1gb ram in your system you can make a 2gb partition on the hdd which will act as ram, the linux OS will read and write to this partition as ram. Starting up a parition editor LiveCD such as gParted. Or any LiveCD linux OS, such as linux Mint will have gparted included. Setting up your partitions as an example: 1 40gb primary partition, 100gb extended partition with 2 x40gb on each end of the extended parition and 1 swap partition at the end, the rest can remain freespace. Then installing the various operating systems on these partitions. windows if included should go first as it's bootloader isn't good at dual/trple/quad booting :P On my Desktop I have setup: my first partition is vista which I have very limited amount of software installed. Avg, spybot, adobe reader, and games -> Then I have a VM for programming, which has a ton of software on it. and is 3 times larger than my base system. This makes my base system extremely fast for gaming. My second partition I have Linux Mint (My favorite debian system, because it's the prettiest). My third I have Linux from scratch, linux from scratch is a 300page pdf, that shows you how to install a system from source code, compiling everything yourself. I have set this up very lightly, with most programming packages, libraries, utils, shells, but no windowing system such as X or GNOME. My forth is OpenSolaris. Which I have only installed recently. Trying to accompish the same on my laptop as well, but the OpenSolaris cd seems to hate it. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
