What's up with Hatim?

Solaris was my first direct interaction with UNIX(first college lab session for introduction to computing in which we were taught how to send/receive our email through pine). Since then I have always been fascinated with Sun machines and Solaris. It may be long time before I own a kickass  Sun Server for my own personal use, but with Solaris_x86 in picture, I can play with one of the most advanced operating system on the planet on my old P4 box (I also plan to install Minix, *BSD, and lots of other open source OSes).

I ordered a free Solaris Express DVD of solaris from Sun's website. I was surprised to get it within 2 weeks as normally these things reach pretty late in my locality. I popped it into my Intelx86 machine and fired it up. It booted kind of slow, but that could have been my DVD drive. It was not pleasant to find out that the default X server which the installation DVD loaded was not showing up on my Intel D865 based vga.

I booted again in text mode and started the installation process. After a reboot I looked into how to configure X and network. I was unable to get both working in the first try. I went to Sun's support chat site and I was mentioned the hardwae compatibility link. I tried the Solaris device detection java webstart applet. Every thing checked out (except for my bt878 based tv tuner card). The JNLP mentioned a link for third party network drivers, which I later downloaded (but was only able to get working after some beating around the bush)

Then I decided to visit #solaris on irc.freenode.net (from my other machine)and boy was that an eye opener. First this I learnt is that Solaris is not Linux ( I knew that, but if you even mention name of Linux in #solaris you get flamed easily), second #solaris has lots of rude shrews. They help less and try to establish that their  "brain size" is more than yours since you asked a question. Although looking up on google before you ask a question is always recomended, but it is possible to not find answer to a simple question from a Google search. Any ways I decided NEVER to goto #solaris. I would like to leave the self contained so called UNIX admins to their own sad lonely existance. I went to #opensolaris where people are friendly and enthusiastic (like any open source project).There I got some good pointers.

Solaris has two kinds of X servers;Xsun and Xorg. Xsun is probably a good choice for Sun machines, but Xorg produced better results on x86 machines. The problem I encountered was that the default configuration produced by X -configure was only good for higher resolutions. A utility called kdmconfig lets superuser choose between the two servers. The configuration of Xorg is similar by the use of 'xorgconfig'.

Solaris x86 express edition comes with alot of goodies which include StarOffice 8, Netbeans 5.5, Sun Studio Enterprise, Gimp, Firefox to name a few. It has two desktops CDE and Gnome. Gnome based desktop looks quite polished (just like Ubuntu).

Overall my first impessions of solris are quite positive. But these impressions are superficial and very cosmetic. In reality I am more interested in knowing more about the internals of Solaris (Kernel and TCP/IP stack and things like DTrace).