A perfect New Year Gift from Sun Microsystems - A Free Solaris Media Kit

A few weeks back, I had shared with you the news of Sun Microsystems distributing free Media Kit consisting of the latest build of Solaris 10 operating system. I had placed an order for a media kit at their website and guess what, a couple of days back, I received my copy of Sun's free media kit.

The media kit is a fabulous DVD case consisting of three DVDs - a copy of Solaris 10 6/06 build operating system for the x64/x86 platform, a copy of Solaris 10 6/06 build operating system for the SPARC platform and finally a DVD containing Java software goodies which include Sun Studio 11, Sun Java Studio Enterprise 8 and Netbeans ver 5.0.

Fig: Sun Media Kit DVD case

Fig: DVD case opened

Fig: The Media Kit contains 3 DVDs

I was successful in installing Solaris 10 on my machine from the DVD and the installation went without a hitch. Solaris 10 comes with a graphical GUI installer as well as a text based installer. Sun specifies the minimum recommended memory requirement for running Solaris 10 to be 512 MB. I was able to successfully install the OS on a machine with 256 MB memory. In fact, if your machine has just 256 MB RAM, Solaris automatically selects the text based installer. For machines with at least 512 MB RAM, it uses the graphical installer. And if your machine has less than 256 MB RAM, it refuses to install on your machine. Solaris 10 bundles with it two desktops - Common Desktop Environment (CDE) and the more popular Java Desktop which is really the Gnome Desktop running on top of a Java framework. Solaris 10 also comes with two X servers, them being the Xsun Server and the more common Xorg server and you can choose one over the other at the time of installation.

You can look forward to a review of Solaris 10 on this site in the near future. But for now, you may whet your appetite by viewing a couple of photos I took of the Sun Media Kit ;-). And those who haven't yet placed an order for the Free Media kit can do so at Sun's website - but before that, just make sure that your machine has the required memory to run this robust operating system.