I would like to share my experience with Solaris 10 x86. I have pretty extensive Linux experience, but exactly zero Solaris experience, so while my notes will be useless for more experienced SOlaris crowd, they might be of interest for Linux guys who like me want to try Solaris. Comments from more experienced Solaris people are very welcome (especially as I made a few generalizations that might happen to be incorrect in some contexts).
HowTo install Solaris x86:
1. Get the right hardware. Unfortunately, you never know whether it will work until you try, Sun HCL is of little help. Still, it looks like very common things tend to work.
I've tried it on MSI Neo board with NForce 3 chipset - no success, but old ASUS CUSL2 (815 chipset) with NVidia 5200 and DFX-538 NIC (Realtek-8139) worked Ok.
2. Get 5 CDs from Sun site - 4 Solaris and 1
Companion CD. Last one is not strictly required though.
3. Set BIOS to 'non-PNP-OS'. I did it later, when dealt with NIC, but it shouldn't hurt if set at this stage either.
4. Create free _primary_ partition for Solaris only; 16G seems to be good number to start playing.
5. I've tried multibooting with BootIt NG manager (installed before Solaris) - worked as it should; Solaris kills BootIt NG when installed, but restoring BootIt NG after Solaris installation makes Solaris bootable from BootIt.
6. Try to install. Went horribly on NEO board and pretty smoothly on ASUS CUSL2; sometimes tends to 'hang' for several minutes with no visual feedback, but it continues later.
7. Within installation, choices are pretty straightforward. Note: it is very likely that it won't see your NIC (didn't see mine 8139, which is a very common one), and therefore won't configure network. Well, you'll need to deal with it later.
8. After installation, I've got working OS but no network. Not too bad.
9. NIC. I've got Solaris x86 driver for Realtek-8139 from Realtek site (
http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloads1-3.aspx?lineid=1&famid=3&series=16&Software=True ), and followed instructions in it's readme. One problem was that DFX-538 PCI vendorId/deviceId were not listed in the Install script, so I've needed to edit Install script. One of the tricky questions is - where to see all that ids? a) in BIOS when booting computer (and if you don't see your NIC there, it likely means that it is not configured by BIOS as it is set into 'PnP-OS' mode, and therefore won't be seen by Solaris). b) ids can be seen within Solaris, by prtconf (with or without -p, -pv or -v switches) command. Note that if devices are not configured by BIOS, you won't see them in prtconf. After reboot (and probably interrupting reboot and asking to re-scan hardware) I've got driver installed (and prtconf shown it without "driver not attached" message).
10. After NIC driver got installed, I needed to get network stuff to work. I've issued "/usr/sbin/sys-unconfig", which maybe is a too radical way of doing it, but it worked. It rebooted computer; after reboot, it started to ask lots of questions about the network. I have static routing, so no idea how it really works with DHCP, but setting static routing is very straightforward. One problem was with setting DNS from there - I didn't succeed on the 1st try so told that I don't want any of NIS/DNS/... choices and dealt with it later. After going back to Solaris, I've got network working without the DNS (so numeric ping's/traceroute's worked).
11. DNS. setting hosts: to "dns files" in /etc/nsswitch.conf and creating /etc/resolv.conf with "nameserver my_dns_server_IP" line did the trick. I had Solaris 10 x86 with a network. Bingo!
