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Important: the notes here reflect my best knowledge about Solaris a couple of years back (at the time when Solaris 10 became available for free download). None of the methods here should be considered best practice without further validation.

Table of Contents

Installation

  • Download from: http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/
  • Even with a modest selection of packages to install, Solaris uses almost 10GB disk space. This is good to know in advance for planning your disk/partition needs.
  • During the installation, first chance you get record your IP address and create a normal user account! (Without that, I found myself stuck with unusable X configuration and no way to get out.) It's good to have a normal account because root login with ssh is disabled by default.
  • When presented with the question of the Desktop Manager, you want the Sun Java Desktop System (= Gnome)
    • To change the Desktop Manager later, you can use kdmconfig. (Choose Xorg.)

Configuration

  • The following seemed a nice way of creating a group for users and a user account with admin status:
 gropadd -g 100 users
 useradd -g users -G staff -d /export/home/janos -m janos

  • The default screen resolution is very small. To make it bigger I created an Xorg configuration file with the /usr/X11/bin/xorgconfig. I used default values for most options. Not too surprisingly Xorg did not work with the resulting configuration file. To make it work I changed the video driver from vga to vesa. For the mouse wheel I added Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" to the mouse settings.
  • How to set the hostname:
    • After a standard installation my hostname was unknown.
    • When the IP address gets assigned dynamically, I don't believe it's possible to setup the hostname. There appear to be several hosts files, but even if I set the hostname of the loopback interface 127.0.0.1 to something, since the network interface has no name, my hostname remained unknown.
    • After configuring my DHCP server to assign a hostname, the DHCP client of Solaris updated the following files:
      • /etc/inet/hosts (symlinked from /etc/hosts)
      • /etc/hostname.pcn0
    • Without a DHCP server, I guess these are the files to update by hand.
      • The DHCP client program appears to be /lib/svc/method/net-physical, and it won't detect the network interface unless the file /etc/hostname.IFNAME exists.
  • How to change the default shell:
    • There is no chsh, use usermod instead:
      usermod -s /usr/bin/bash janos
    • There is also no chfn, vipw either.
  • How to make caps lock an additional control:
 xmodmap -e 'clear lock'
 xmodmap -e 'add Control = Caps_Lock'

Adding software

How to install software in your shiny new Solaris system.

I wish there were easy to use package management tools and public repositories of program packages for Solaris 10. However, a wide range of packages can be installed in either of the following methods:

  • Download from http://www.sunfreeware.com/. See detailed notes below.
  • Go to the program's website, they might have binary builds for Solaris 10 (for example Firefox).
  • Compile from source.

Sunfreeware.com

 lftp -c 'o ftp.sunfreeware.com/pub/freeware/intel ; mirror 10'

  • I could install the following packages with no problem whatsoever:
    • wget-1.9.1
    • vim-6.3, ncurses-5.4, glib-1.2.10, gtk+-1.2.10
      • Note: the glib and gtk+ versions do matter.
      • To make it colored, export TERM=xterm-color.
  • sudo-1.6.8p9: instead of the wheel group, I used staff because it already existed and had the same GID as usually wheel. Configured /etc/sudoers accordingly using /usr/local/sbin/visudo.
  • subversion: it had a lot of dependencies, see the website for the list. Also, had to add this to ~/.profile:
 export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/apr/lib

  • coreutils: to have fancy colored ls

Adding users

I thought this would be the right way: 

 useradd -m -s /usr/bin/bash janos

But it didn't work somehow. For one thing, root has no write permission to /home by default. Adding it is easy enough, but I didn't want to make changes to defaults. So did this instead: 

 useradd -m -s /usr/bin/bash -d /export/home/janos janos

Better yet, create a group for users: 

 groupadd -g 100 users

...And create a user as a member of users and with supplementary membership to staff like this: 

 useradd -m -s /usr/bin/bash -d /export/home/janos -g users -G staff janos

The shell can be changed later too with: 

 usermod -s /usr/bin/bash janos