After my recent issues with Red Hat Linux and my desire to broaden my Unix knowledge, I have decided to purchase a Solaris machine. One of my trusted colleagues swears by Solaris and its reliability and performance. I personally prefer to stick with Linux given my long experience with the OS, but I also want to add Solaris to my repetoire of Unix knowledge. I purchase a Sun Ultra5 workstation with a 400 mhz CPU, 256 MB of RAM and 9 GB HD for just under $200. The great thing about the Ultra 5 is that it uses IDE drives so I can easily purchase larger inexpensive IDE drives and in fact, I have an extra drive floating around that I will use for testing purposes.
I downloaded ISO images of Solaris 9.0 yesterday so I will be fully prepared for the server’s arrival tomorrow. I will keep the blog updated with my progress.