> I'm going to be getting an old 90mhz pentium w/128mb ram and a 1gig
> hard drive any day now. I plan on loading a version of UNIX on it so I
> can get more familiar with the OS and perhaps, if happy with the
> development environment shift my development efforts over. Question: I
> have a copy of the latest version of Solaris 7.0 for PC. Would you
> recommend using this or a version of Linux (Red Hat for instance). At
> Borders/Barnes & Noble I notice that there is a lot of material on Linux
> but nearly nothing on Solaris.
I have been involved with Solaris administration for many years (SPARC,
not x86) and I agree that there is not a lot out there (at least not a lot
inexpensive). The two books I am aware of that directly address your concerns
are:
Solaris System Administrator's Guide, Janice Winsor, (MacMillan
Technical Series), $34.99 - amazon.com pricing
Solaris : Advanced System Administrator's Guide, Janice Winsor,
(MacMillan Technical Series), $39.99 - amazon.com pricing
They are OK books, but they are not what I would like to see -- basically
not enough technical detail to walk you through actually doing anything
complicated and there are some obvious holes in their coverage (for example, in
a lot of the networking stuff).
If you use general purpose books, make sure you get one that is oriented to
System V Unix, otherwise you will get very confused when you compare the book to
Solaris.
So what would I do if I was a newbie going to try Solaris? (1) Get
the first of the above books. (2) Solaris comes with a lot of Sun
documantation. While it is not the best stuff for a newbie, there is a
lot of information in it. Read that. (3) Subscribe to the sun-managers
mailing list (that is probably the best run, most useful mailing list I
have ever seen) -- send email to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" with
"subscribe sun-managers" in the body of the message. (4) Get the Solaris
FAQ (ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-hierarchy/comp/unix/solaris/) and the
sun-mangers FAQ (ftp://ftp.cdf.toronto.edu/pub/sun-managers/faq) and read
them. (5) For certain complicated questions, be prepared to buy books that
specifically address these issues. O'Reilly publishes invaluable references for
sendmail, DNS, and TCP/IP administration. There are also books on NFS, NIS, and
NIS+ but you shouldn't need these. (6) Peruse the free support portion of Sun's
website -- particularily learn how to access the free patches. (7) be prepared
to put a lot of time into this if you really want to learn it.
As to your fundemental question Linux vs. Solaris -- you can learn the
fundementals of Unix from either, you will just take a slightly different road.
They are both very complicated to learn and administer properly (but then so is
NT). In a production environment I would choose Solaris but then I would also
be prepared to spend money for Sun support, there ain't no such thing as a free
lunch.
Bob Weaver
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