Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 26th Jun 2007 11:50 UTC, submitted by Michael
"There's a problem with Solaris and Sun knows it. The installation experience of Solaris (along with other areas) could be greatly improved. The installer doesn't 'suck' as it's easy and known to Solaris administrators, but for a Linux or Windows user it could prove to be a bit challenging. For those of you that have never tried out Solaris, what we've decided to do is to show you this 'usability gap' with the installation process in Solaris compared to Linux. Is the experience really that bad?"
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Member since:
2005-07-07
Agreed. Sun is trying to find a wider a audience/user base for Solaris. Their installer is OK, but still very rudimentary. This may well be because their customer base has traditionally been UNIX users/administrators and likely previous customers who are well versed with their installer.
It may interest your readers to know that even their pre-installed Solaris can be problematic. I bought a Sun Ultra 40 (AMD) machine from Sun two months ago. First, upon turning on the machine, I get an error that no os was found. I check the bios and I realize it is set to boot from USB only. Then the installer hangs after a prompt for a hostname! This was on a machine with Solaris pre-installed! I have tried a number of Linux distros as well as 64-bit Vista and I am pretty sure it was not a hardware issue.
Solaris has a great reputation which is probably deserved, but for someone who is a mere tinkerer, it can be something of a challenge to install. Had I been more determined I probably could have succeeded, but other than the novelty of running Solaris I didn't know of any benefit for an ordinary user-hobbyist.