I am returning to the world of Solaris. My original foray into the land of (the) Sun didn't go so well. It was a try and buy 60 day trial of a T1000 that just didn't go a well as I had hoped. Some of the problems were Sun's fault but most of them where mine. One of the big issues was proximity. The T1000 was hosted in an off site data center which required several layers of indirection to get to the machine and some things are just harder to do remotely. The bottom line is I didn't get the most out of the 60 days. But I really am interested in learning more about Solaris. DTrace is simply too compelling a technology to ignore, especially now that Solaris is opensource. So almost 8 months later I'm revisiting the land of Sun.
This time around I'm doing things a lot closer to home. I've added a SATA RAID controller and 4 35GB 10,000 RPM HD to my workstation. This will be Solaris' new home. I had to get rid of my CD-R/W for a 3 disk enclosure but I have an external USB DVD-R/W so no sweat.
A standard Solaris install is bit more heavy weight that I'm interested in. Coming from the land of Gentoo, I'm used to and prefer installing things as I need them instead of a default kitchen sink install like the one that comes w/ standard Solaris 10. Plus, I'm a tinkerer. Fortunately for me, Sun saw me and my kind coming and has a distro taylor made for us; OpenSolaris Developer Edition. We get the latest and greatest Solaris kernel and the developer tools necessary to tinker, compile, and profile. It has a (relatively) recent GNOME based desktop and Firefox is the default browser.
As soon as I'm done posting this I'm going to go burn my (downloading) distro to DVD and install it. Stay tuned.
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