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A lot of the content of this blog will focus on Solaris because I will utilize quite of lot the advanced features, e.g zones, zfs and DTrace. Today you can get Solaris in quite a lot of different flavors, Sun Solaris, OpenSolaris and Nexenta to name a few. Personally I run Solaris 10 but any of the others are also good choices. If you want to be on the bleeding edge then OpenSolaris is for you (the hardware support is also slightly better). You can also choose between x86 and UltraSparc today. Most of you won’t have access to UltraSparc-based hardware so x86 will be the natural choice.

Why select Solaris instead of the multitude of Linux distributions out there? I can turn around that question and ask why not? Almost everything that you expect in a Linux distribution also exist for Solaris. All the open-source software you are used to are either available in a binary form from e.g Sun Freeware or Blastwave or you can download the source and compile it yourself. There is a lot of commercial software for Solaris. If you need support from the community you have OpenSolaris. If you want to pay for support you have Sun. There are many good reasons to try it out if you haven’t yet.

I’m not going to try to write an installation manual for you. Dennis Clarke of Blastwave has written an excellent step-by-step manual for installing Solaris 10 Update 3. Your first install will be a manual one but later on I will describe how to setup automatic installs using Jumpstart.

So if you have never tried Solaris now would be a good choice to download and test.

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