2025-03-27


Tried installing the latest Solaris (the proprietary version from Oracle). 

This was done on a Dell 'Optiplex 990' from ~2011, using an SSD that already had a few GTP partitions on it. 


The latest version is, it appears, from 2018...  version 11.4. 
Download, after making a free account. 
 https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/downloads/solaris11-install-downloads.html

The obtained file was a USB-drive image of 854 MB, for the "text installer". The other installer options are a similar installer for running from CD, or variations for setting up automated installation - not a 'graphical installer'.

This started cleanly when run from the computer's UEFI boot options. 
No problem running through the installation .. a bit unclear about the partitions, where the F5 option to change a partition-type to the required 'Solaris' actually just marked a partition as unused, then doing it again allocated the space from the two such unused partitions as a new Solaris partition (not clear how one could have chosen more detail .. best to partition in another system and include a Solaris partition, then run this installer). 

It worked fine to reboot and to log in on the console. 

Network was up, and it transpired that modern Solaris has a handy packaging system with pkg command, similar-looking to FreeBSD etc. 

NFS mounted nicely (an NFS4 export from a Linux system). 


From the web, the way to get all that's needed for a graphical login screen and desktop and enabling these, is simply:
#  pkg install solaris-desktop 
This indeed worked, giving session options of GNOME, GNOME Classic, and Xterm. 

The screen resolution was low: 1024x768.
It looks as though Nvidia cards would be well supported, but not this (I think) Intel onboard thing

The provided video player (totem) didn't show video, but played audio, for a Vorbis+H264 in Matroska file from some 10-15 years ago.  And it didn't play audio, but showed video, from another file with opus audio and something video in a webm container. 

Firefox was provided, but in a very old version (50ish, now 130ish!).  

To get a C compiler, the SunStudio (now Oracle DeveloperStudio) was installed from 
  https://www.oracle.com/tools/developerstudio/downloads/developer-studio-jsp.html
This entailed getting a cert and key pair from the registered user part of the Oracle website, and using the pkg command with these, to add the repository for the studio. 

Some discussions of available packages and latest versions led to this, 
  https://github.com/oracle/solaris-userland/
where apparently Oracle has made available the open packages provided in Solaris.



Everything was old, from 2017/2018.  It seems no updating is provided unless perhaps making a "proper" account with subscription ... a little attempt at accessing the details on the webpage required declaring a multi-factor authentication method (email; other option phone), and then I used this to give the sent one-time code, but this just came to an 'unauthorized' page. 


Summary from the quick trial: 
  pretty good:  it ran network and audio and gui on this old computer, and would have presumably done good graphics resolution if using a supported card such as nvidia ones
  obviously, getting updated programs, thorough codecs, technical programs, etc, is likely to be a hassle