Solaris, please don't overwhelm me

A few weeks back, I decided to try and play with Solaris. It's from Sun, it has some really nifty analysis that can be done on Java executables, and I had fond memories of it from a few years ago.

Install went great. Kind of. It takes forever, and it comes with all kinds of shit that I don't need. But then, I probably don't know what I need.. I'll say this much: it didn't have any trouble with any hardware at all. And, it even has the courtesy to let me know that my ethernet link is "copper".

Foolishly, I decided to opt for a DHCP setup knowing that I'd be switching to a static IP soon.
Once the box was up and running, changing from DHCP to a static IP was not quite fun. First, you've got to tell Solaris not to acquire an address on boot. From what I gathered, this meant deleting your NIC from a set of DHCP seeking set:

rm /etc/dhcp/nic.dhcp

Then, you've got to reconfigure the rest of the stuff. Which isn't as simple as what I'm used to on Linux. Multiple files, in multiple redundant directories.

ls /etc/net

gives you:

ticlts/ ticots/ ticotsord/

Anyway, lots of googling later, I stumbled through it and made the needful happen.

Then, I saw an ugly. For some reason, root is created with home set as /. And, you log in to CDE as root, as the first thing you do, which means that your root file system now has CDE's turd files for root sitting in it. Of course, there are some other goodies that get dropped in there too from anything you start as root. Quick change to /etc/passwd and this was resolved, but it was mighty irritating.

Pkgadd is marvelous. It's the equivalent of apt-get for Solaris, and it works fine. Until I ran out of space.

The auto-partitioning on Solaris didn't mesh with what I needed. And I seem to have filled it up in the wrong places so bad that I'm pretty much handicapped right now. I could spend some time debugging it and re-partitioning to get the system healthy, but then I remembered why I loved Solaris so much when I used it before. It's because I used it, and I didn't administer it.

If someone is willing to manage and administer it, I'd hop on in a heartbeat. Alas, I just don't have the time to make it my workstation just yet. Maybe at home, down the road.

Hello there xubuntu... Care to dance?