[Tfug] Solaris x86 experience

[Neil Short]

Maybe I was expecting something a little smarter.

The installer(s) did not offer a whole lot of options.
These are things I noticed:

1) There was no option to modify the boot record. It
just did. No biggie. It at least let me put my own
boot record back on and still boot everything.
2) The installer SAW my FreeBSD partitions and I
specified that those partitions were not to be
modified. Well, the installer still rewrote the
partition table around my FreeBSD partitions and
rendered that OS unbootable. I was able to recover
those partitions, however.
3) Neither the installer nor the fully-booted OS could
see that I had a usb mouse plugged into the usb port.
That's when I noticed the next problem:
4) Documentation seems to be pretty bad. There is
nothing on the Sun website that I could find. The
newsgroups seem to be filled with "If it doesn't work,
it's the fault of your equipment. My USB mouse works
fine on my computer." Yes, there is a 2-cd set of
documentation that I can download and burn. Maybe I'll
look at them. There is nothing out there that is
reasonably easy to find in the way of what to do to
make the OS look for a USB mouse.
5) The man pages don't work. I thought that they were
just not installed but I just now noticed an old
newsgroup posting that suggests that the $MANPATH
variable needs to be set and man page configuration
tools need to then be run. (windex? catman?).

Yes, I know that Solaris is not really a good "hobby"
OS; but I'm thinking this may be a little bit over the
line. Maybe it's just me.

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The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment. - Albert Einstein

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