Free Solaris 10 DVD

[fos]

Sun Microsystems is offering a free Solaris 10 media kit. (See link below.)

http://www2.sun.de/dc/forms/reg_us_2211_391.jsp

fos....

[Leon]

I bought a Solaris media kit a few months ago. It included a disc with the Solaris free software; that includes the KDE desktop. I don't see any mention of the free software disc in the free offer, but in any event I do recommend to all the ***X enthusiasts giving Solaris 10 a trial. The Solaris common desktop environment is quite usable, and for Gnome fans the Java desktop will be very familiar. The base install includes Star Office 7, Rev. 5, so you OO users will have a familiar office suite readily available.

One suggestion: select the Sun VESA video driver for your installation; the Solaris implementation of Xorg has been a bit rough.

And: Solaris 10, like FreeBSD, needs a primary partition. It now boots with GRUB, so you can either chainload it from another Linux's GRUB, or use its GRUB to chainload your other OS's. I would recommend of course making your first install on a "lab rat" or a spare drive.

[fos]

Has anyone received one of the free Solaris DVD kits?

I ordered one when it was first offered and I'm still waiting.

Maybe I didn't make it through the requirement filter.

fos....

[bhobjj]

I ordered one when it was first offered and I'm still waiting.


Same here. I got a reply email from Sun in mid January that said it would ship in 10 days. Nothing yet.

I am interested in trying some of the solaris tools.
I tryed playing with Nexenta (http://www.gnusolaris.org/gswiki), but the installer is a bit difficult to use and I decided that it was not worth my time.

[lisi]

<Quote>We have received your request for a free Solaris 10 and Sun Studio 11 DVD
Media kit. Assuming that the mailing address you've provided is valid and
resides in a country in which it is legal for Sun to ship media, you should
expect for your kit to arrive within 10 business days.</quote> 15-01-2007 (Or 1-15-2007 across the Atlantic)

Maybe they just thought that too many people had asked - my address is certainly valid and although as a country we are seriously xenophobic, CDs are allowed in.

:-(
Lisi

[lurch]

On 16 January 2007 I ordered a disk online and received the same reply as Lisi. Nothing in the post yet. Perhaps Sun sent it by sailing ship.

[danieldk]

Received my set yesterday.

[bhobjj]

Received my set yesterday.

I got mine in the mail the same day.

It took a very long time to install. Only sets up root user. It uses grub for a boot loader, and installed the boot loader to the root partition as I wanted, but it even though it is installed to hdb3, the local grub menu.lst was setup as hda3. I can (and have) edited this to correct the problem. This could be a problem if you are not familiar with configuring the Grub bootloader. I was surprised that the installer was not very polished.

Also hardware support is like going back to Linux kernel 2.2. The "java desktop" looks like a "Gnome desktop" to me.
Seems like going back in time.

These are just some first impressions

I need to spend some time trying out some of the shell tools, see if I can get everything configured, and see how stable the system is.

Very generous of Sun to send the DVDs.

[danieldk]

I was pleasantly suprised by their new Solaris Developer Express. It's based on new OpenSolaris builds, uses GNOME 2.16, has all modern productivity apps, and includes many development tools. They provide ready-to-run VMWare Player images, so that's what I used. Very interesting to say the least.

[lisi]

Mine still hasn't arrived. :-(

Lisi

[fos]

Leon sent me a set but I still haven't received the factory version from Sun.

fos

[lurch]

I'll order again online and see what happens.