I'm new at this...Solaris on my home PC?
I don't want to sound uneducated...I am, for my age, a genius with computers. So far, the only "popular" OS I'm not familiar with is Sun Solaris, and the only (I mean ONLY) hardware I'm not familiar with is server hardware such as Sun-branded machines.
I have the following computer:
ASRock K7S41GX Motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ 1.8GHz CPU
512MB DDR333 RAM
ATI Radeon 9200 128MB AGP 8x Graphics
160GB WD IDE HDD (will use 20GB if I can't dual boot with Windows)
SiS 7012 (AC97) 3D Audio
Generic CD-RW drive
3 1/2 and 5 1/4" floppy drives (one each)
Peripherals are a USB Hewlett-Packard keyboard which doubles as a hub, an optical PS/2 mouse, a USB printer (Lexmark Z816), and my hard drive MP3 player (Creative Zen Micro).
My current operating system is Microsoft Windows XP Professional, SP2.
I'd like to know the following:
A. Can I dual boot Windows and Solaris on the same physical drive and same partition? (mainly I am asking: is Solaris NTFS compatible?)
B. Will Solaris run on/be compatible with my hardware? I looked at the HCL, my hardware isn't listed apart from another 9000 series ATI video card.
C. Is there the possiblilty that, due to an incompatibility, my hardware may be damaged by Solaris (similar to the way that a virus can "fry" a processor)?
D. Is there an emulator for Windows programs?
It may look like the sensible thing would be to keep using Windows, however I like experimenting with other OSs and in today's world it is best to have extensive knowledge of all that are available.
I use Gnome at the library where I am now and understand it is similar to Solaris. This similarity, among other things, makes me want to use Solaris.
Thanks,
Kevin
A member since five minutes ago:)
[1883 byte] By [
kkishkon] at [2007-11-25 22:57:50]
# 1
I'd do 1 of 2 things if I were you.
A.Use partition magic and make you a 10-20gb partition on your boot drive. Install on that partition. (hint, dont use standard slicing because solaris will use a bunch of the space for the file sharing slice i.e. /export slice will be huge and the / slice wont) . Dual boot.
B. Find a copy of vmware and use that to run windows and solaris at the same time.
I've done both and I like the latter. It allows you to experiment with several types of OS (at the same time) without messing up your windows setup. The only thing is that you need a fair amount of memory. I have a P4 1.8 w/1gb and it seems to work well running windows XP, Solaris 10, and netBSD at the same time.
# 2
<table border="0" align="center" width="90%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td class="SmallText"><b>kkishkon wrote on Fri, 27 January 2006 13:22</b></td></tr><tr><td class="quote">
A. Can I dual boot Windows and Solaris on the same physical drive and same partition? (mainly I am asking: is Solaris NTFS compatible?)
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No. Solaris CAN boot on the same physical drive but NOT the same partition.
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B. Will Solaris run on/be compatible with my hardware? I looked at the HCL, my hardware isn't listed apart from another 9000 series ATI video card.
</td></tr></table>
Solaris should boot on your hardware. Your video card should be supported no problem and you can get audio drivers for your SiS 7012 chip <a href="http://www.tools.de/solaris/audio/" target="_blank">here</a>. (Thank you, Jurgen!!)
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C. Is there the possiblilty that, due to an incompatibility, my hardware may be damaged by Solaris (similar to the way that a virus can "fry" a processor)?
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No, and I've never heard of a virus "frying" a processor.
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D. Is there an emulator for Windows programs?
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Not that I know of but you should be able to get Solaris equivalents for many of your Windows programs. Sun's StarOffice 8 reads most MS Office files and there's a version of Realplayer for Solaris x86, too.
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I use Gnome at the library where I am now and understand it is similar to Solaris. This similarity, among other things, makes me want to use Solaris.
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Solaris's new desktop environment, the Java Desktop System, is based on Gnome so it should be very familiar.
(Note: I'm not a Sun employee, just a Solaris fanboy. :-)
