UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I recently got a sun sparcserver 5 to play around with and to practice unix on. When I got it, it currently has solaris 2.5.1 installed from the boot sequence. This is a server without a video output, so i'm using a serial terminal. Also it doesn't have a floppy or cd drive. I was wondering how it might be possible to circumvent the password on solaris in this case or how i should go about installing another distribution, in which case i was considering using netbsd. Please help me.

Check out <a href="http://docs.sun.com"><b>docs.sun.com</b></a> for installation procedures. It looks like you may need to install over the network.

And for changing an unknown root password, you can <a href="https://www.unix.com/search.php?s="><b>search</b></a> the forums for more info.

Have fun, and good luck!

after looking over the other posts in the forum i come to this question: how do I make a unix boot disk?

Well, if it doesn't have a floppy drive, where are you going to put the floppy?

Hi there Oxygen5,

just thought I would add my piece.

If you have a second computer running Linux/solaris, it would be possible to perform a network install by doing a "Jumpstart".

I have seen it done and there are a few documents turned up when I did a net search for "linux solaris jumpstart".

Sorry I cannot help with the specifics, but I thought you might like to know what is possible.

AND you can do all of this without needing a floppy or cd drive in the SPARC.

Instructions for doing this with two solaris machines are here.

well even though it doesn't have a floppy drive, i figure that i can put one in, since when i was looking inside of it i did see the floppy header. I can use a std pc floppy drive right? I was somewhat hoping to salvage this install of solaris because i don't have the install cds for any copy of solaris. So how do I make a boot disk?

You can download Solaris installation CDs from Sun's website if you need an installation disk, you can get it from http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/get.html