Hey Bro,
The problem with downloading the solaris files so you can burn them to cd or dvd and then using them to install the OS on your system is that windows is retarded and doesn't know what to do with the information and how to properly burn it to CD without damaging it. I'm assuming you used a windows based computer to download the iso images or dvd images to get solaris in the first place, yes? Ok, my brother who is some sort of computer guru helped me because I was having the same problems, the transition of the solaris code (which was originally written in a unix format or FAT or file allocating sytem) do not translate well into NTFS which is the format/file allocation system that windows is written in.
Ok so my advice is that you go ahead and order the Solaris DVDs from their website. The bare bones DVD's are 15 dollars, they do contain some utilities and it comes bundled with the latest version of Star Office. However, for 30 dollars you get it all, you get the media kit which includes 8 DVDs. You get the latest Solaris 10 code with self installer, lots of freeware utilities, developer tools dvd, management tools dvd, lots of other dvds. The new version self installs very easily and has a very up to date list of drivers.
I installed Solaris 10 on my laptop. It's a Hewlet packard Pentium_4 3.2 GHz chip -- which means it's (X86) based or PENTIUM-based, also known as IBM comptaible, as oppossed to Apple-compatible chips which are SPARC chips and run on UNIX instead of windows. And hence the eternal battle between good and evil, Mac/unix vs IBM/windows compatible... Windows being "evil" LOL
Anyway, so my laptop has an ATI Radeon graphix card, and it had no problems detecting the sound card, graphics card, motherboard or anything. The only hting I did need to tweak was the ethernet card. I had to go to the realtek website and there I found and downloaded the driver for my card and it came in Solaris version. So you might wanna go to your control panel, click on system, go to the HARDWARE tab and click on device manager. Look for your ethernet card and see who is the manufacturer. Then go online and find their website and see if you can download a driver for your cards made for the solaris platform.
Anyway, the earlier version had some errors. The new version (version 1/06) meaning that it's the most up to date version as of January 2006 has a buttload of new tweaks and adjustments to make it work better, it has some code modifications and all errors have been fixed. Sparc computers simply means that they're runniong on a Sparc "microchip" which for some strange reason they just started calling 'processors' all of a sudden, as if there had been some secret underground meeting and THEY all decided to start calling them processors to conuse us normal people, just like stoves are no longer called stoves-- you go to Best Buy or Sears or any other appliance store and they snootily refer to them as "ranges" and if you dare call them "stoves" they act shocked and offedned with indignation.
Anywho, unfortunately as of now there is no Solaris 10 books you can buy from barnes and noble or amazon.com So no "Solaris 10 for dummys" yet but if you can manage to get your hands on a good solaris instructional book you should do just fine. You do not wanna get a LINUX book because LINUX is just weird enough and different from Solaris to make your life more difficult than it should be. The Solaris instructional classes or CDs that Sun Microsystem sells can be a tad expensive. I was browsjng their website earlier and this one CD that teaches you the basics/fundamentals of UNIX with an emphasis or a perspective on Solaris 10 was about $960 dollars. Yikes!
There is a book you will find very useful: "Unix For Dummies" 5th edition, that's the most up to date newest one.
http://www.dummies.com/WileyCDA/
Ok now basically there are 2 main versions of UNIX, or two styles. The first and original version of UNIX was called UNIX, simply that, and it was createdand released by Bell Labs, but it was only released to universities back in theday. Everybody started tampering and modifiing the code and now you got all kinds of Unix like FreeBSD, SCO, XENIX, HP-UX, SOLARIS, SunOS, Apple OS, Linux, AIX, and SGI-SIRIX.
Oh wait, back in the way they managed to combine System V with BSD inorder to make a standard user friendly UNIX system. And it worked, they came out with somehting called SVR4 Unix. Fearing that confusion would end, easy interoperability and compatability between computers and a standard Unix platform would become common, software manufacturers quickly scrambled to put together OSF/1, thus ensuring that confusion would prevail, and prompting a "cold war" between manufacturers to see who could come up with the least intuitive and unusable OS imaginable, which is what we have today... Linux, Red HAt, Free BSD, and Solaris being the most promising ones... and then the computer gods saw that it was good & smiled.
Ok so UNIX from Bell Labs was bought by Novell, which decided to give everyone and their mother a copy and two styles emerged: BSD and System V All these new versions of UNIX we have today (including Linux) and Mac OS are either the spawn of BSD or System V
Now, the better one, in my opinion is System V it's just easier to work with. But for some unglodly reason BSD is the more widely distributed and popular one. Strangely, even though solaris belongs to the shamfeul BSD family, it's quickly proving itself and demonstrating that it's the best one out there.
Oh, one more thing, go to
http://www.unix.org/ and you can get THE official documentation on UNIX plus a list of all manner of useful commands. It's a good site to immerse yourself in when you have nothing to do for a good while.
Happy Computing!
Robert Ovalle
"For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"--George Carlin
03-30-2006
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Solaris 10