Thursday, March 22, 2007

 

Best Way To Get Started With Solaris

If you are a developer you can really benefit by using Solaris as your development OS. However, many are scared off by trying to get it setup. However, there is a little know short cut. That is the VMware for Solaris, Developer Edition It is a prebuilt VM image of Solaris Community Edition with a plenty of developer's tools preinstalled. I have been using it at as my primary development system at my new job for the past couple of weeks. I am shocked at how well it works. No need for multiple machines with a KVM. All I do is set Solaris' resolution the same as my Windows desktop. Then I just switch to VMware and hit ctrl-alt-enter and the whole screen is my Solaris desktop. Almost as good as the Sun Blade 1000/SUnpci combo. I figured it would be too slow but so far so good. The only bad thing has been Emacs doesn't accept the alt key as the meta so I need to use esc instead. I am sure the is a fix I can put in my .emacs but I just haven't got there yet.

My only wish was that Solars was the host and Windows was the guest instead of the other way around. Maybe one day...

Comments:
Hi Bill,

Been trying to get Solaris Express Community Edition build 67 to install in a VM on ESX 3.0.1 without much luck (gets to Configuring /dev and then just spins forever when I have it configured for the LSI SCSI adapter). Did you find a prebuilt VM from Sun?

-Nate (also from Hampton Township)
 
I don't think the prebuilt VM will work on ESX but never tried it really.

I would try setting up the VM with Buslogic instead of the LSI. That might work a little better.
 
Thanks for the reply, Bill. It seemed to get a bit further but eventually failed to see the drives. I guess I could go looking for Buslogic Solaris 10 drivers although I'm a little unmotivated. Hopefully, I'll be beta testing ESX 3.1 soon. It's expected to have upgraded virtual hardware. Solaris Express Community Edition build 67 seems to work very well on my MacBook Pro under VMware Fusion 1.0 release candidate. That version of Fusion has the same virtual hardware as VMware Workstation 6. Hopefully, ESX 3.1 will follow suite.
 
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